Optometry Internship in Nigeria

It is no longer news to the world and especially to Nigerians how optometrist interns struggle to get appointment in various hospitals in the
country especially government hospital.


It is basically excruciating to find out that few federal medical centers  teaching hospitals, and general hospitals take optometrist intern and when they even do, the interns usually end up paying huge sum of money before they are allowed to sit for interviews. After the interview, the aforementioned hospitals will appoint at most four candidates out of more than 500 candidates that sat for the interview. These interns have to do their one year mandatory internship programme because they have temporary license and must do this within a limited time.

Another issue I need to stress out here is the issue of 'ima mmadu' or 'to know somebody'. After paying a heavy application fee, studying fervently to pass the interview, you're still not sure of getting the job unless you know somebody or somebody who know somebody within the hospital who can secure the job for you. This is pathetic! Imagine, the best graduating students of reputable colleges of optometry go for interview at hospitals different from their Alma mater (if their Alma mater even take them) and not even one of the best ten graduating students get placement.

Believe me, this current situation is basically discouraging hard work among optometrist interns since hard work is no longer recognized. Is it the issue of buying placements were the employer collects application fees, conduct interviews, cast all the result of the interview into the waste paper basket and then commence the phase of auctioning the placements. Interested interns end up paying an unofficial huge sum of money (N100000-200000 or even more) before they could get internship placement and those that can't afford the money are on their own.

There is another situation were the employer decides to employ less interns than what is accredited for that hospital.
For instance if a particular hospital is accredited to employ 100 interns, the
employer may decide to employ 50 interns and salaries of the remaining 50 interns will be secured for the Oga at the top. This act creates artificial scarcity of jobs, making it difficult and impossible for all the graduates to promptly do their mandatory one year internships.

On the other hand, some greedy interns might decide to do their internship twice, thereby preventing newly inducted interns from carrying out their own programme. This incident is usually due to lack of jobs after NYSC and lack of nationally centralized control over internship programme, besides, the internship salary is very attractive.

In addition, the few hospitals that takes optometrist intern will never ever advertise it, what we usually see is house officers, pharmacy interns, medical laboratory interns, etc but they will never include optometrist intern, instead they will secure the positions for those that will probably pay them money or those related to them (family and friends).

Optometrist internship in Nigeria is becoming more of who you know in the institution and how much you have in your bank account. If you're with empty account and you don't have anybody in the system, 'oyo' is your case (on your own).
I am seriously calling on various agencies involved in optometrist internship in Nigeria to do something about this ugly situation.