The recently-inaugurated Committee on the Status of Medical Education in Nigerian Universities has met with the Executive Secretary, National Universities Commission, Professor Abubakar Rasheed, to present to him an interim report on their assigned task.
This is as the NUC reiterated its stance on the need for
medical doctors in the academics to acquire Master’s and doctorate degrees to
enable them attain the rank of professors.
There have been controversies over the need for medical
doctors to acquire Master’s and doctorate degrees following the acquisition of
medical fellowships.
Earlier, the NUC’s Executive Secretary reiterated that the
recently introduced Doctor of Medicine programme was for an entirely different
purpose from the original medicine by fellowship programme and “therefore,
submitted that one can never replace the other”.
According to a statement posted on the NUC website, sighted
by our correspondent on Tuesday, Rasheed received the team led by the NUC
Deputy Executive Secretary, Academics, Dr. Noel Saliu.
“The Executive Secretary stated that the committee still has
much work to do in areas such as: Basic Medical, Allied Health, Dentistry as
well as Basic Clinical and Clinical Sciences as they were all part of medicine.”
Rasheed urged them to work assiduously to generate a
reliable record and status of medical education in Nigeria.
“He charged them to dig deep into those salient issues that
would restore the pride of medical education especially by looking into whether
the nation’s available medical colleges have training facilities for students
and if the students are also properly trained. He told the team that the
commission needed to have all this data so as to know the advice to give the
government and other institutions in the country.
“The NUC scribe explained that since he assumed duty, he had
fought hard to deal with medically-related issues almost on a yearly basis
because of the fractions in medicine.
“He gave kudos to medical doctors who had refused to be engaging
in unsavoury issues, remarking that it was through persistence that he was able
to get medical doctors together to look at the medical curriculum. He stressed
that medical education had to change and expressed his delight about the
changes brought into the medical curriculum”, the statement said.
The Executive Secretary further said that NUC had initially
wanted to disassociate itself from the medical postgraduate institution that
tried to exercise undue powers by awarding PhD’s, arguing that people could
become world-class scholars in medicine but that a PhD in medicine makes it
more complete.
While harping more on the issue, Rasheed said students on
the PhD should not be overloaded with course work like those doing Master’s in
medicine, which is clinically-based.
He reiterated that PhD should be more of research stating
that without Master’s and PhD, no one would emerge as a Professor in Medicine.
He urged the committee to do its best to bring out a good document on the
status of medicine in Nigeria.
Responding on behalf of the team, Dr. Noel Abiodun Saliu
promised that the committee would compel the Vice-Chancellors of Nigerian
universities to submit the list of necessary documents required to help it
fast-track its assignment as well as build in the anticipated data that would
show the state of the medical facilities in the nation’s universities.
He assured the Executive Secretary that the committee’s
assignment would be completed by the end of the month of April.
Others in the committee on the status of medical education
in Nigeria included: Professors Ibrahim Yakasai; B.B. Shehu; King David Yawe;
Joseph Ahaneku, while an employee of the NUC Directorate of Academic Planning,
Saadiya Sambo, would serve as the Secretary.