The Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Health will work together to standardise the procedures and standards for accrediting teaching hospitals at Nigerian universities.
Dr. Osagie Ehanire, the minister of health, stated that collaboration between his department and the ministry of education was very beneficial at a meeting with Malam Adamu Adamu on Thursday in Abuja.
Since education and health are the two pillars of human capital development, according to Ehanire, this is because of the training that doctors, nurses, and all other members of the health ministry receive through education.
He claimed that the main purpose of their meeting was to talk about the potential for adding more hospitals, whether they were private, state, federal, local, or even denominational hospitals.
“This is to determine standards that are going to be used for accrediting them to take interns and do housemanship because there are many people who graduated and are waiting for positions for intern which they don’t get.
“This meeting will help us to expand the positions available for interns,” Ehanire said.
He also said that on the question of residency training, he said that the two ministries were looking at the curriculum to see what needed to be added to the medical studies’ curriculum.
He added that the possibility of harnessing the knowledge and skills of Nigerian experts and professors abroad to teach Nigerian doctors virtually or as adjunct professors was also being considered.
“With all the more universities for health sciences growing, we need more lecturers and professors.
‘’If you don’t have them in the land, we can, through virtual technology, get professors outside the country.
“This will help to improve the quality of training to expand the scope of what we learn, and bring in modern cutting-edge knowledge and technology into the health sector.”
Speaking also, Dr Nnaemeka Nwankanma, Deputy Registrar, Medical and Dental Council of Nigeria, said that over the years, there had been some areas of misunderstanding as to how both ministries would contribute to the training of medical doctors in Nigeria.
“So, what we have done here is to try to fine tune and probably harmonise protocols that will allow for seamless training of doctors in Nigeria.
“This is so that both parties will understand that we are equal stakeholders and we have a responsibility to our nation in making sure that the training of these doctors is done along international best practices.
“We are looking at better training of doctors in Nigeria to make them world class,” he added.
Nwankanma said that though both ministries had, in the past, been in partnership over the issue of harmonisation, both ministers were coming together for the first time over the issue.
This, he said, showed political willingness to get things done right while expressing surprise that medical students still found it difficult to get places for internship.
He added that it was necessary to set the minimum criteria required for hospitals to qualify to become teaching hospitals.
Also in his remark, Prof. Abubakar Rasheed, the Executive Secretary, National Universities Commission, urged the two ministries to work closely to improve medical education.
He said that NUC, interacting with the medical educators, had been debating the issue of internship in the last few years.
He also disclosed that in the past five years, all the relevant bodies had been working on the new medicine and dentistry curriculum.
Rasheed said that the curriculum would cover basic medical sciences and allied health sciences.
“All these we have not started implementing but they have been conceived in the spirit of the best global practice, also looking into our unique Nigerian situation,” he said. (NAN)
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