By Philip Osunsami
The Minister of State for Health, Dr Tunji Alausa, on Thursday, stresed the need for Nigeria to move its 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.
Alausa, who made the assertion while on a working visit to the University College Hospital {UCH}, Ibadan, noted that what the administration of President Bola Tinubu 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 dollars annually.
Alausa,  who commended the president said that President is extremely passionate about taking the country to where is suppose to be among the comity of nations and that he is giving so much attention to the healthcare sector and it is such that has never being  given before by nay of the past administrations.
He said: Â “I want to commend the CMD for his wonderful presentation. I also want to commend him and the members of the management board for the job they are doing.
“We have a government being led by President Tinubu who’s extremely passionate about healthcare not just about healthcare alone but passionate about taking our country to where it suppose to be among the comity of nations and we 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 but one of our economy drivers of our country. 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 dollars spend 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’ve started and we have our four pillars.
“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 living a normal and respectable life.
“The fourth pillars, of course, Â we have to look beyond healthcare just providing physical security, we have to ensure it provide social security and national security.
“Such 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 we 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 that you mentioned, 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, the schools that you have do not have their own budgets, their budgets is being incorporated into the hospitals own. So it is not fair and it causes inadequate funding. So the new initiative is to begin to create a separate budget for each of those schools. It makes sense when we start defending our budget now. When we have a separate budget for these schools, we can begin to direct more fundings to those schools, so we have started that though it is late for this year but by next year it will be put in place.
“Also on the human resources for health, we want 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.
“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 findings 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. This is the first time we have this kind of amount budgeted for health. We are just starting, even as we move forward, we will still need to do some supplementary budget at some point but we can’t fix the problem at once but the good thing is that we have a direction, a committed president and a reinvigorated Federal ministry of health that is up to the task in supporting our hospitals so that they can begin to deliver a high level and exceptional care to our citizens.
“On the water problem, I hit 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. The beautiful thing about our human resource for health which you probably have sent in the public is that, the president In his magnanimity has been kind enough to now domicile wavers for hospitals. So not that the head of service will not do what they have to do but it is just the noise that we’ve been hearing from CMDs and Medical Directors about the bottle neck in getting wavers from the office of the Head of service. Now we have decided that it will be better if the waver process starts form the ministry of health. So going forward from this year, we have set up a waver committee that we cater for all our hospitals. I know that’s a good news, however, we will hold the hospitals accountable because to whom much is given, much is expected because we all knew what happened at the Obafemi Awolowo University Teaching Hospital where waver was given to recruit 400 people mostly clinical people but they ended up recruiting 2000 people. So with the new arrangement we are putting in place, such kind of issue will not repeat itself. It is whatever quota that given that will be recruited. So the process will be much easier but there will be full transparency and at the end of the day we will significantly improve the human resource crisis that we are having in our hospitals.
“With regards to infrastructural, obviously it is not only in UCH that we have such problem, all our other tertiary hospital have infrastructural deficit. So we will work very diligently and we have a significant amount in the Budget to support improvement of infrastructure. We have sent out memo to our hospitals to submit their priority lists, so that we can start with the most needed first. We won’t be able to do everything now but by next budget, we will be able to advocate our case before the president, the minster of budget and finance and to the legislator on the need to fund us more. As we do that we are also looking at how to generate more funds for our healthcare sector. So you can be rest assure that these government is working to ensure what we have a properly working healthcare sector and also you have to look innovative means to generate funds because government cannot do everything, you have to get innovative means to bring in more funds for the hospitals”.