The bill at the National Assembly which seeks to empower medical practitioners to treat gunshot victims without waiting for police reports is timely. The bill, sponsored by Senator Osita Izunaso, Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) Anambra State, seeks to compel medical doctors to treat patients with gunshot wounds immediately they are brought to the hospital and then file the necessary reports about the presence of such patients with the Nigeria Police within two hours of treatment. The bill also proposes a N100, 000 fine on medical doctors who fail to give immediate medical attention to gunshot victims brought to their hospitals.
Undoubtedly, the bill will go a long way in preventing unnecessary loss of lives caused by the delays in attending to victims with gunshot wounds. Although there is no section of the 1999 Constitution, the Criminal Code or the Police Act that that requires victims of gunshot wounds to have a police report before they are treated, medical practitioners have made it a compulsory requirement that gunshot victims coming for treatment must have a police extract accompanying them. This requirement is intended to know the identities of the patients with gunshot wounds and the circumstances under which they were shot to ensure that criminals shot in the process of robberies do not go under the radar of Police surveillance for them. Nevertheless, in many cases, rather than aid the Police in the capture of fleeing criminals, innocent citizens who are victims of the robberies have died because they were refused treatment in hospitals where they were rushed to for treatment on grounds that there failed to provide police reports. 
But Mr. Ogbonnaya Onovo, Inspector-General of Police (IGP) insists that it is not a requirement of the law that gunshot victims provide a police report before they are treated in hospitals. According to him, what is expected is that the victims should be treated and then the police contacted. His words; “At no time did the police restrain medical doctors from attending to the needs of gunshot victims.”  If this is the case, how did the police report come to be an issue in treating gunshot wounds? Many innocent lives have been lost because there was no police report accompanying them to hospital. For instance, the recent death of Mr. Bayo Ohu, an assistant news editor with the Guardian Newspaper could have been prevented, if the hospital where he was rushed to had treated him before demanding for a police report. Ohu is just one of the hundreds of innocent victims of gunshot wounds who died because they were not accompanied to hospital by a police report.
Perhaps, medical practitioners are only trying to play safe by demanding police reports from gunshot victims. In many cases, overzealous police officers have harassed and intimidated doctors who treated gunshot victims. Some doctors have even been accused of being accomplices to armed robbers. Of course, there is also the issue of who would pick the medical expenses. According to Dr. Damilola Lewis, Oyo State chairman of the Nigeria Medical Association (NMA), the lawmakers failed to provide a workable answer as to who would take care of the medical cost in the bill. Undoubtedly, medical practitioners run their hospitals to make profit and not as charity organisations. But even in running their businesses, medical practitioners must understand that the value of human life is priceless. The Hippocratic Oath sworn to by every medical practitioner requires them to not just uphold medical standards of their profession, but specifically to seek to preserve life. The Hippocratic Oath specifically states that in all situations, the first obligation of a medical doctor should be to save life. This implies that even an armed robber with a gunshot wound should be saved.
It is therefore laudable that the National Assembly is making efforts to make it mandatory for medical practitioners to treat victims of gunshot wounds without invoking the non existent law that a police report must accompany a gunshot victim to hospital. The House of Representatives is therefore urged to pass a similar bill which should then be forwarded to the executive for presidential assent.
The IGP should also educate the officers and men under his command on the non existence of “the police report” requirement in the nation’s legal lexicon because there are still policemen who continue to intimidate the uneducated public. The NMA on its part should also educate doctors and nurses on this issue. The association should always report any case of police harassment for treating gunshot victims to higher police authorities.
However, the Federal Government should take seriously the implementation of the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS). This is because when doctors know that there is an insurance scheme in place that would take care of the medical expenses they are more likely to render service. If governments at all levels fail to establish health insurance schemes which can help to offset the medical bills of this category of patients, hospitals may continue to reject victims of gunshots on excuses of unavailability of certain hospital equipment.