Anthony Natif
I’ve seen raging debates on whether interns should be paid or not. I think it’s a wrong debate. We don’t really pay interns in this country. We give them a subsistence allowance.
We basically hand them enough resources to keep them alive (barely) so they can keep millions of Ugandans alive. Interns, and to a lesser extent senior house officers (SHOs), are the backbone of Uganda’s public healthcare sector.
It’s not unusual to hear of medical interns who log more than 100-hour work weeks.
In some hospitals in far-flung districts, these interns are usually the only ones on duty. They run the hospitals while their supervisors (hospital superintendents) are away.
We call this learning and say the interns should be grateful and even pay for the opportunity.
The only learning happening in most of these settings is learning how to swim at deep ends because that’s where they’re thrown. All the time!
They’re expected to navigate the raging waves of drug stock-outs, shortage of gloves, blood, and equipment, name it.
They see their patients succumb to curable illnesses because of a lack of antibiotics that cost less than $10 (Shs38,000) a dose.
They hurt, roll over their deceased patients, dust themselves off and come to fight another day. It’s a brutal grind.
Emotionally debilitating too. The sense of helplessness is overwhelming.
I can’t imagine having this compounded by constant calls from landlords and hunger pangs because they don’t have any cash to support them.
It’s understandable when the government says it is embracing austerity measures and thus needs to prioritise its expenses. But to start by cutting off the lifeblood of a nation is a strange approach.
What do we lose, for instance, if we reduce the number of Parliament sittings by half and reallocate those funds to areas like this? It’s not like those debates of theirs are moving the Ugandan socio-economic needle that much.
As an austerity measure, we can have less of them in the short-term and keep Ugandans alive.
Then you have the budget that supports external healthcare to the higher political classes. This alone can pay interns for a few years.
What does it say that we have some Ugandans with government-funded Cadillac healthcare and others with nothing to write home about? Isn’t it time we went back and revised those allocations in an equitable manner?
The other alternative would be a full embrace of co-pay in government hospitals.
One suspects that this has political ramifications that the government wouldn’t want to see in the short to medium term, especially with 2026 around the corner.
It’s the same reason the National Health Insurance Scheme might never see the light of day.
But ultimately, it will have to come to us tasking anyone looking to access public healthcare to chip in something. A dollar here, a chicken and goat there, a post-training income tax break for medical workers etc.
It can’t simply fall on interns to sacrifice “because they are learning”. That’s just bad policy. Lazy, crude policy actually.
The writer is team leader, Public Square, @TonyNatif
