Olororunnimbe Mamora, minister of state for health, says
President Buhari has resolved to curb medical tourism.
Mamora spoke on Monday in Abuja when a team from CPL Medical
Group Limited, a local engineering company engaged in the rehabilitation of
teaching hospitals in the country, paid him a visit.
In 2017, Buhari spent about three months in London on
medical vacation. And he has made frequent trips to the UK on ”private visits”
believed to be for medical reasons In
August, the president said the country loses about N400 billion to medical
tourism annually.
The minister said
hospital environment and bad attitude of workers are largely responsible for
medical tourism in the country.
“President Mohammadu Buhari has resolved to curb medical
tourism by supporting initiatives from individuals and groups. We are focused
on improving working conditions in the hospitals because medical tourism is not
necessarily an outcome of lack of medical equipment.
It encompasses factors like lack of conducive hospital
environment and poor attitude of health workers towards health care delivery” Mamora said.
He assured Nigerians that the federal government was working
towards entrenching the right standards in terms of attitudinal change and
procurement of equipment. He said the responsibility of the health ministry is
to formulate government policies on health while implementation involved
relevant stakeholders, so that the
sector could move to the next level.
He expressed delight
at the progress reported by the team in the implementation of the various
stages of engagement with the presidency, adding that government is partnering
the Infrastructure Regulatory Commission to ensure best practices in healthcare
delivery. Earlier, Albert Awofisayo,
chairman of CPL, gave an update on the status of the third phase of the federal
government and the group’s partnership on the special presidential intervention
project to advance the tertiary health sector in the country.
The chairman
solicited government’s support towards the successful implementation of the
rehabilitation of the 22 federal university teaching hospitals. He said the group also planned to construct a
green-field 500-bed ‘Federal Centre of Medical Excellence’ in Abuja with the
collaboration of Mayo Clinic, Rochester, USA.
“We are partnering
with major hospitals across five continents for the health outfit which will be
called Mayo clinics,” he said. He
appealed that the project be considered as strategic by the administration of
the president. He pledged that the
standard of services to be provided by the proposed 500-bed centre would be of
“best global standard”.
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