By Adeyinka Adeniran
The Minister of State for Health, Dr Tunji Alausa, on Thursday said the Federal government is working to move the healthcare sector from a consuming part of the economy to be one of the drivers of the economy as it is obtained in many advance countries of the world.
He made the assertion while on a working visit to the University College Hospital (UCH), Ibadan.
He said what President Bola Tinubu administration is working on is to ensure that the country’s healthcare care is at par with its counterparts in developed countries where the healthcare sector is a driver of the economy and not a consuming part.
The minister cited the example of the United States where the health sector contributes about 24 per cent to the country’s GDP which translates to about $3.3trillion annually.
He said “We have a government being led by President Tinubu who is extremely passionate about healthcare, and not just healthcare alone, but passionate about taking our country to where it’s suppose to be among the comity of nations and we are more fortune that the attention he has given to the health sector hasn’t been given by any administration in the past.
“More so, the world is changing, we need to move healthcare beyond a consuming part of our economy to one of the drivers of our economy. You go to other advance democracy in the world, the US for instance, healthcare contribute about 24per cent of their GDP which translates to about $3.3trillion spent annually.
“So the way we are going to move our healthcare forward would be in that direction where we would give our people opportunities and you see we have started and we have our four pillars.”
He listed the four pillars to achieving the feat to include: governance, improving population outcome, value chain and security.
“First thing is governance. We’ve done a lot to start improving governance. Governance entails a lot of things like holding ourselves accountable and giving the citizens of Nigeria the care they deserve, the respect they deserve as we care for them.
“The second part of our agenda is improving our population outcome, and how do we do that, we have to strengthen our healthcare infrastructure, equipping hospitals, providing the needed manpower.
“The third part of our pillar is unlocking our healthcare value chain. Moving our healthcare sector to providing durable, good and sustainable services to attain transformation where we can begin to live a normal and respectable life.
“The fourth pillars, of course, we have to look beyond healthcare just providing physical security, we have to ensure it provide social security and national security”, he added.
The Minister also harped on the need to improve training as a way of addressing dearth of human resources in the sector saying “UCH has done a lot in training and I look at the training programme that are here but we now have to start training not for now but into the future to meet our needs. Today, a lot of things have changed, the kinds of diseases that we have now were not in existence forty years ago.
“You will be so surprise if we take the census of the numbers of cardiologist that we have in Ibadan today, they are not up to ten but as a training institution, we must train excellent cardiologists. We need to erect a proper training structure that will produce specialized people in these new medical conditions that we are having now. We need to now begin to make super specialist in our country to meet the need of our time.
“In regards to the tutor programme, we have about five Al over the country but then the nursing council decided that these schools should be turned to a degree awarding college. Ibadan nursing tutor programme did the right thing by doing what they are suppose to do.
“The others one would be closed down because they don’t meet the standard anymore and the people in their wisdom that founded those tutor programmes did so because we had shortage of nurse tutors and that’s why they founds those programmes but into the future now, the nursing and midwifery council has redesigned their curriculum the way the training is being done, we now have enough nurse tutors across the nation, so there’s no need for keeping those schools but I want to commend those in Ibadan for following the new requirements of the Nursing and Midwifery council and for doing what needed to be done on time.
“Also on the human resources for health, we want to have more people engaged in our health sector. We have a lot of young people in the country that we must give opportunity for them to work. One of the ways to do this is to increase the acceptance percentage of these schools.
“The acceptance percentage of UCH School of Nursing is very low compare to schools like Harvard who is among the best in the world. So we have to increase production. We also need more structures and equipment, and we will be working with other agencies of government to come up with how we can mobilize funds for that.”
While commending the Chief Medical Director of the UCH, Prof Jesse Otegbayo and the members of the management board for the job they are doing, the Minister said the issue of power, water provision among other infrastructural needs and amenities will see him engage the required authorities for solution urging the management not to however rule out the possibility of home grown alternative solutions especially in addressing the power challenge.
“With regards to your request on power, we will speak to the minister of power on whatever solution we can come up with to solve the power problems. But we had to also look into the future, there are some generators now that are using CNG, I will suggest the hospital look into that, and we can also look into polarisation.
“We now have solars that can power the whole hospital, so I think we should look into that and as we begin to mobilize more fundings into healthcare, you have to begin to do your homework well, do your energy survey, trust me the President is so committed to the healthcare sector.
“On the water problem, I saw the memo you sent and I have been talking to the minister of water resources on the dredging you made mention of and I’m sure we will be able to do something about that”, he added.
