The Federal Government has cleared the hurdles in the ways of the employment of health workers to address the depletion of medical officers migrating from the country.
A government committee has been constituted to address the matter of accumulated waiver requests for the employment of health workers in hospitals nationwide aiming to enhance healthcare delivery.
Minister of State for Health, Tunji Alausa, who made this known when he paid a familiarisation visit to the University College Hospital (UCH), Ibadan, Oyo State, said as soon as the Ministry verifies the employment list of the health institution, there won’t be any barrier for the institution to carry out the employment.
In a statement on Friday by the Director of Information, Patricia Deworitshe, the Minister, during oversight visits to evaluate federally-owned health institutions in the country, highlighted the significant concern of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu regarding the shortage of human resources for health.
Alausa said with the challenge of shortage of human resources for health, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu saw the need for the process of waivers to recruit healthcare workers to be more streamlined and simplified.
This, he said, was why the approval of the issuance of waivers request for hospitals is now domiciled at the Federal Ministry of Health.
“This is due to some bottlenecks faced by our Chief Medical and Medical Directors, in the process of getting waiver approvals.
“We reached out to the Head of Service of the Federation, (HOSF) Dr. Yemi Esan, who has been on top, working judiciously to get these approvals, but we just all decided that it will be easier if the waiver process starts from the Ministry.
“So going forward from January, we are setting up a waiver committee at the Ministry that will promptly review and address all waiver requests from all our hospitals,” Alausa was quoted as saying.
Alausa assured of accountability and transparency in the process while he emphasised that each hospital would generate a request for the number of staff needed to the Ministry, which will then go to the HOSF for some checks and balances under the establishment law, to see what’s budgeted for the year.
