Medical interns were attempting to hold a press conference to demand the Ministry of Health deploys them, but police stopped them.
Monday morning, the interns convened at the Mulago Guest House, where they called journalists to discuss the necessity of deployment to various medical facilities.
However, they discovered that the area had been sealed off by the police. In Uganda, comparable difficulties have previously been faced by medical interns.
The same group planned to march to parliament to petition the speaker about their fate and had scheduled a news conference for April 11th, 2023, at the same location.
The cops also stopped this from happening. During the news conference on April 11, Dr. Frank Asiimwe Rubabinda, President of the Association of Surgeons of Uganda, said it is obvious that the government cannot handle the growing number of medical interns graduating from the growing number of medical schools.
By April 1st, 2023, new interns were meant to start at over thirty internship sites, but this hasn’t happened yet because of problems with the training procedure, which the Ministry of Health is still consulting on.
Police were strongly deployed during the press briefing on the recent event, and some of the medical interns at Mulago Guest House were taken into custody.
The interns intended to travel in two different groups, one starting at the local National Theater and the other at Mulago before continuing to Parliament.
Twenty interns were detained at Kampala’s Central Police Station after being detained by police on Parliament Avenue.
Other Mulago arrestees were held at Wandegeya Police Station. The Uganda Medical Association’s (UMA) Secretary-General, Dr. Herbert Luswata, stated that they had gotten in touch with their legal team to learn whose medical interns had been detained and to arrange for their bond release.
Dr. Addison Tumuhimbise, a pre-intern from Mbarara University of Science and Technology (MUST), had earlier issued a warning that they would be obliged to begin their training on strike if the Ministry of Health does not immediately provide the internship names.
By the time this story was filed, police had not responded to the interns’ arrest because they were not returning calls.
