For the past four months, the University College Hospital (UCH), Ibadan, Oyo State, has been short-paying its graduate interns, FIJ can confirm.

Over a hundred of these affected young medical professionals cut across the various departments of the teaching hospital, such as optometry, dental technology, radiography, nursing, pharmacy and physiotherapy.

Multiple sources confirmed to FIJ that past interns from 2019 and 2020 are also yet to be paid their arrears of at least six months.

At one of their meetings with the top officials of UCH in April, the management told the interns they ere experiencing difficulties with making full payments because Federal Government compelled the institution to switch all, staff including the interns, from the Government Integrated Financial Management Information System (GIFMIS) to the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System (IPPIS).

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With the IPPIS, all registered public health workers can be directly paid by the Federal Government while the old GIFMIS allows the government to disburse all salaries to the management to pay its staff internally.

As a result of this development, since January, UCH has been insisting that interns’ salaries should come directly from IPPIS, but a hospital source confirmed to FIJ that none of these interns has been biometrically captured for the new mode of payment.

“By the way, the Federal Government isn’t aware of the number of interns living in the hospital’s lodge. How come all the intern lodgers have N12,500 deducted from the already slashed salaries if not from the UCH management?,” the source questioned.

Investigations also revealed that the employee pay slips generated from UCH’s portal differ from the actual credit alerts received by over a hundred of these interns.

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For instance, payslips of nurse interns reflected that they were paid N99,000 each between January and April, but they were actually paid approximately N58,000 in January, N63,000 in February, N58,000 in March and N40,000 in April.

Instead of paying their colleagues who are intern physiotherapists N127,000, they were approximately paid N73,000 in January, N39,000 in March and  N56,000 in April.

For  intern dieticians who ought to be paid N99,000, they received N57,000 in January and N62,000 in February. Pay cutss of between 50 and 65 percent were confirmed by the remaining departmental interns.

When these interns could not bear the injustice anymore, they again met with Dr. Abiodun Adeoye, Chairman of UCH Medical Advisory Committee.

Please we don’t want promises but we want something to be done,” one of them said in a video obtained by FIJ. “When you compare us to our colleagues in other institutions, those ones are getting their full salaries. This is not fair.”

Dr. Adeoye assured that their concerns would be presented before the management board.

Toye Akinrinlola, UCH’s Head of Information Unit, declined to speak with FIJ on the phone, insisting he would only talk during a one-on-one meeting.