According to a British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) study, Nigerian doctors who are hired to work in the UK are being professionally exploited.
Doctors are overworked to the detriment of patients, according to BBC research by Paul Kenyon and Anna Meisel.
The study revealed that Nigerian doctors hired to work at hospitals in the United Kingdom have complained that they are being taken advantage of.
The doctors worry that they are working too hard and could endanger the health of their patients.
The investigation showed evidence of how a British healthcare company recruited doctors from Nigeria to work in private hospitals under conditions not allowed by the National Health Service.
One of the doctors who spoke with BBC, Augustine Enekwechi, a Nigerian doctor, who worked at Nuffield Health Leeds Hospital in 2021, said he was approached by NES Healthcare, a private company that specialises in employing doctors from overseas, and was offered a visa sponsorship and a potential job.
The doctor said he failed to notice that the NES contract opted him out of the law that protects UK workers from excessive working hours and left him vulnerable to a range of salary deductions.
Enekwechi added that his hours were extreme – on-call 24 hours a day for a week at a time – and that he was unable to leave the hospital grounds. He says working there felt like being in “a prison”.
“I knew that working tired puts the patients at risk and puts myself also at risk, as well for litigation,” he says. “I felt powerless… helpless, you know, constant stress and thinking something could go wrong,” BBC quoted him as saying.
Dr. Femi Johnson, a different physician who worked at a different hospital, claimed that he was likewise required to put in 14 to 16-hour days of work before being on call overnight.
“I was burnt out,” he says. “I was tired, I needed sleep. It’s not humanly possible to do that every day for seven days.”
Johnson added that when he needed a break, the NES was entitled to deduct money from his salary to cover the cost of finding a replacement doctor.
“In situations like that, I always make that internal discussion with my inner self – ‘Femi are you doing right by yourself and are you doing right by the patient?’” he told BBC. “Unfortunately, I haven’t always been able to answer that question.”
However, the British Medical Association called the situation “awful” and stated that the industry must follow the NHS’s working procedures.
From an exclusive access file given to BBC by The BMA and the front-line lobbying group the Doctors’ Association,
It found that 92 per cent had been recruited from Africa and most – 81 per cent – were from Nigeria. The majority complained about excessive working hours and unfair salary deductions.
The UK healthcare system, according to Dr. Jenny Vaughan of the Doctors’ Association, has split into two tiers: one for NHS doctors and the other for foreign recruits working in the private sector. She claims she has received several complaints from RMOs.
“No doctor in the NHS does more than four nights consecutively because we know that it’s frankly not safe,” said Dr. Vaughan.
“This is a slave-type work with… excess hours, the like of which we thought had been gone 30 years ago.
“It is not acceptable for patients for patient-safety reasons. It is not acceptable for doctors,” Vaughan said.
The Deputy Chair, BMA Emma Runswick said the situation was a “disgrace to UK medicine”.
“Our international colleagues have come a long way to the UK, and have found conditions so exploitative it beggars belief.”
Not less than 10,000 doctors who obtained their degrees in Nigeria currently practise in the UK according to findings.
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