BY OLA AJAYI, IBADAN
Governor of Oyo State, Senator Abiola Ajimobi has described as unacceptable the parlous state his predecessor, Otunba Adebayo Alao-Akala left the medical profession saying he left only 120 medical doctors in the employment of the state.

As inadequate as they are, he lamented that the past administration could still allow the situation to get worse by their strike for six months.

To worsen the case, he said the state did not have a screening facility for blood, thus exposing the teeming population to HIV/AIDS and other terminal diseases, through the transfusion of unscreened blood.

He said this at the conference of the Nigeria Medical Association (NMA), held in Ibadan yesterday.

To check the ugly trend, he hinted that within forty-eight hours of his assumption, the medical practitioners were among the professionals that he invited to fashion ways the state can move forward.

Though, he stated that the new administration came on board with no illusion about the quality of health it wanted for its hospitals, he promised to redress the wrongs done to the profession and make it rank among the best in the country.

“During our interface with various groups of professionals before and after the elections, we stumbled on pathetic cases of the plight of medical doctors in our state. We were appalled by the abandonment of the sacred place that a healthy nation places its health providers, in our state. We were horrified by the paucity of incentives for doctors to practice their profession in our state”, he said.

He stated his administration’s desire to partner with the NMA, towards uplifting the health status of the state hoping the partnership would change the parlous state of our healthcare and bring succour to the faces of millions of people who access  public health centres in the state.

He said, “it is unacceptable that our doctors would conduct surgical operations at the theatre using the light of their cell phones; it is totally unacceptable to this administration to have our medical doctors work in hospitals without required equipment at their disposal. We will not improvise equipment in hospitals. We will ensure that such a regime is a thing of the past in our state”.

He added further that the trend of public hospitals turning out to be the death beds of the long-suffering people would soon be a story.

“Our target is to have hospitals which are places where our people can access the best healthcare available. This goes without saying that it is only with your cooperation that this lofty objective can be achieved, he promised.