Afe Babalola Urges MDCN to Increase Admission Quota for ABUAD’s College of Medicine
Gbenga Sodeinde in Ado Ekiti
The founder and Chancellor of Afe Babalola University, Ado Ekiti (ABUAD), Aare Afe Babalola (SAN), has urged the Medical and Dental Council of Nigeria (MDCN) to increase the student admission quota for the institution’s College of Medicine.
He made the appeal during the induction ceremony of 123 graduating students of the institution’s College of Medicine.
Babalola said that in anticipation of the upcoming accreditation exercise, the university authorities built modern structures accommodating over 360 new students.
The MDCN Registrar, Dr Tajudeen Sanusi, advised graduate medical doctors in the country not to travel abroad without a purpose and target for it.
The ABUAD founder said such will guarantee the training of more medical practitioners and the empowerment of those in the profession and pointed out that MDCN desires to have autonomous colleges of medicine in Nigeria to eradicate delayed graduation of medical students, admonishing the graduands to make ethics of the profession their watchwords.
“There is this trend now called Japa. I want to advise you; there is nothing over there. The truth (is) home is home. After completing your training here in Nigeria, the idea of the proverbial seeking greener pastures abroad is not it,” he explained. “Most of our colleagues over there are itching to come back home, and some of them felt they should have been back after completing their postgraduate training. So I will advise that if you must go, have a target, return home on completion of your postgraduate training.”
Sanusi noted that the council made some adjustments, with some schools spending between 10 and 13 years to graduate their first sets of medical students, which became an embarrassment to the system.
“It was one of the reasons why some parents send their children abroad to study. The adjustment put more pressure on the institutions, and I am happy ABUAD was able to cope. Its first set didn’t spend more than six to seven years before graduating. Some nine universities also had their graduations,” Sanusi disclosed.
He added, “MDCN is still looking inwards as to what to do to arrest the situation so that the medical students are not unnecessarily delayed for too long before graduating. By the guidelines of MDCN, it is expected that every university wanting to run degree in medicine or dentistry to operate a college and the it must be an autonomous college.”
The registrar revealed that the MDCN wrote the National Universities Commission on the need to incorporate French and sign languages into the medical studies curriculum for effective communication between patients and doctors.
He warned the young doctors against joining any industrial action while on their mandatory one-year housemanship, adding that as house officers, they are not expected to embark on strike because the one-year housemanship is structured in such a way that it has to be 12 uninterrupted weeks in each of the postings and once it is interrupted they have to repeat it without pay.
