Medical, dental consultants deny receiving bribes, accuse NBS of attempt to dent doctors’ image

The Medical and Dental Consultants Association of Nigeria (MDCAN) has denied a report by the Nigerian Bureau of Statistics (NBS), which accused Nigerian doctors and other medical professionals of receiving bribe from patients before treatment.

It also said the allegation is aimed at denting the image of Nigerian doctors and other medical professionals.

recently a report released by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), stated that 42 percent of health workers received bribes to speed up the procedure and 15 percent also took bribes to make the finalisation of the procedure possible.

The report titled, “Corruption in Nigeria: Patterns and Trends Third survey on corruption as experienced by the population”, was presented by the Data, Analytics and Statistics Section of the Research and Trend Analysis Branch, United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, while the survey implementation, fieldwork, data preparation was done by the NBS.

MDCAN, in its reaction, said the NBS’s report is false and is an attempt to denigrate, dent the image and reputation of members of the noble profession before the public in the country.

The association in a press statement signed by the President Prof. Mohammed Aminu Mohammed made available to journalists in Jos the Plateau State Capital on Wednesday, dismissed the allegation of bribe taking.

Adding that even though Nigerian doctors are among the least paid in the world, they are hard working and will not condescend so low to demand for bribe from patients before treatment.

The Association argued that the report is like giving a dog a bad name purposely to hang it and was done in a bad taste because they are not the only workers that work in health institutions either public or private.

According to him, “To us this unfounded allegations is baseless and totally unacceptable.

“We are demanding for a total retraction of the so call report which is meant to portray Nigerian doctors in a bad light.”

He also demanded that, NBS should avail them access to the methodology and the geographical area they have covered to warrant this conclusion.

“These are some of the issues we felt that their conclusion is grossly unfair to Nigerian doctors despite our hard work and resilient to remained in the country to practice.

Mohammed explained that in most health institutions in the country, doctors are the minority, stressing that the patients and their relatives come to the health facilities to see the doctors, but doctors hardly constitute up to 20 to 30 percent of the population of workers in most of the health institutions.

He further explained that by the time the patients are seeing the doctors in their consulting rooms with face-to-face contact for the first time, they would have gone through layers of other health and non health workers.

“Where then will the doctors be discussing and demanding bribe with the patients as alleged by NBS.

MDCAN also argued that there is no place that do not have bad eggs, but to labelled the hard working and long-suffering Nigerian doctors who shunned greener pastures abroad to stayed back to serve in the country and be painted with allegation of bribery is unfair and very unfortunate.

MDCAN for stated that, it is important that if there are people that are demanding and taking bribes from patients and their relatives in health facilities in the country, such group of health workers or non-health workers must be identified so that they will be punished by relevant authorities.

The association added that there are different groups of trained health professionals like doctors, nurses, midwives, laboratory scientists Pharmacists working in hospitals as well as non health professionals.

MDCAN further explained that in hospitals, there are also different cadere of staff ranging from the security personnel stressing that if any group is desirous of conducting such an important research they should have stratified the different categories of workers instead of lumping them as doctors, nurses and midwives.

“All what we are doing in the country is sacrifice, it is not that we can not move out for greener pasture , but we decided to be patriotic and remained in the country despite so many challenges.

“We are the one that shoulder the responsibilities of those doctors who have left the shore of this country. To wake up one day and labeled Nigerian doctors as corrupt and bribe taker is discouraging.

“As law abiding citizens, we want to give NBS the benefit of doubt so that they can also avail to us their methodology and raw data.

“If we discovered that their methodology is right and have significant samples and proportion of Nigeria covered that allowed them to arrived at this conclusion, we can now look inward to see how we can make amend,” he stressed.

The statement maintained that, if the methodology and sample size are not enough to make this far-reaching conclusion, they will, seek for retraction of the report so that they can tender a written apology in both print and electronic media.