Governor Ahmed made the disclosure on Friday at  Government House, Ilorin, stating that his administration would introduce bond scheme to facilitate training of medical doctors/officers abroad to boost manpower requirements in the critical areas such as cancer, liver problems, kidney and many more health conditions that are prevalent in the world today.

The idea of the scheme according to him is to expose “our medical personnel in the state to best practices on how to manage some of these non communicable diseases ”.

“I think it is high time we begin to reposition the training scheme for our medical personnel. That is why we are coming up with a scheme that will enable us to train medical doctors abroad. They will go on residency in specialized areas” he said.

The governor explained that the sponsored doctors after their training would be made to serve the state for a number of period adding that if government could sustain the training exercise and run it on yearly basis like NYSC scheme, it means at a point in time medical doctors would always be available in our hospitals and health centers across the state.

“In order to support the scheme, we recognized that if we train our doctors under scholarship they will be made to come and serve the state for a number of period before they can be free to go anywhere they want to go and if they want to stay, they can decide to stay” he said.

“That was what prompted the last administration’s desire to build doctors accomodation in all 16 local government areas where we have hospitals and health centers, this was designed to retain medical personnel” he added.

Ahmed said that his administration would leave no stone unturned to create platform that will make it easy for health workers and teachers to be retained in rural areas.