Doctors and nurses treating COVID-19 patients at Lagos State Isolation Centre in Mainland Hospital, Yaba made a clarion appeal to the Lagos state government to pay their outstanding August and September salaries.
The health workers disclosed that they have not received a dime since they started working at the infectious disease centre in August.
The frontline health workers said despite working in a “frustrating and unhealthy work environment” that exposed them to COVID-19, their welfare was not taken into consideration.
One of the health workers said, “As of August 1, about 30 nurses and 16 doctors had been recruited. Although some were decommissioned midway the three-month duration, the rest of us continued working”. They alleged that the two meals per day arrangement put in place for health workers, describing the food as an insult to people attending to COVID-19 patients and struggling not to get infected in the process.
“I cannot properly describe it as a meal because what they serve us can better be described as ‘leftovers’ from the ration that are served to COVID-19 patients. For crying out loud, I think we deserve more.
“Even if we cannot be compensated in other ways, let them just pay us our August and September allowances, please,” he appealed.
A nurse who craved anonymity also decried the situation.
“The government has been unfair to the current set of volunteers. Some of us come from as far as Sangotedo and Ikorodu. Imagine the money we expend on transport daily, with the attendant dangers to life and limbs,” she said.
This was not the first time aggrieved health workers in various isolation centres in Lagos will be complaining about unpaid remuneration.
Last April 1, doctors that were recruited for patient care at the Mainland Hospital, Yaba, had petitioned the Medical Guild and threatened to go on strike due to “neglect, unpaid allowances and absence of life insurance.”
They also complained about not having a “befitting call room” to rest after working long, gruelling shifts taking care of “critically ill COVID-19 patients.
“They should remember that poor health workers like us at the frontline of COVID-19 are yet to be paid a dime since we were recruited,” one of them said.
“All we hear from the coordinator every time is, ‘They will pay, they will pay.’
“Up till now, we are still hoping, praying and expecting that they will still pay since some of us have been decommissioned,” one of the aggrieved nurses said.
