By Dr. Iyke Odo
As we know, health is a universal need. It is everybody’s desire and the number one project of every good government. The health of the individual is so important to him and to society that in the wisdom of the United Nations, it has been classified as a critical fundamental right. Ladies and gentlemen, this is the significance of this gathering.
In a special way, I welcome you our distinguished guests, partners, sponsors, and friends. I welcome captains of industries and their representatives here. Leaders and members of the health professions here present, you are welcome.
My distinguished colleagues, the heroes of the Nigerian healthcare system, congratulations. Observers, the civil liberties organization representatives, gentlemen of the press, fellow Nigerians, ladies and gentlemen.
Today is a special day in the life of our great association and a day of reckoning for our country’s healthcare system. We have invited you here today, especially the organized private sector, with the deliberate intention to recap the ugly experience of our healthcare system and deposit that ailing entity on the theatre table of your conscience for your critical intervention.
We are witnesses to the poor state of our healthcare delivery system that, with all modesty, has eroded the very fabrics of its foundation and left it suppressed and incapacitated. We are witnesses to the progressive obliteration of the lines of distinction between the primary, secondary and tertiary levels of care in the healthcare system that has totally collapsed the traditional referral principle that is the ideology behind the step ladder approach to global best practice.
We are witnesses to the body of healthcare professionals torn apart by a war of misplaced ego prosecuted at the cost of the lives of innocent Nigerians and at the expense of the health and well-being of the health professions. We have also witnessed incessant industrial actions by medical and healthcare workers.
We have seen very poor funding of the health system, the poor infrastructure, poor conditions of service for medical and healthcare personnel in both private and public settings. We have continued to watch helplessly as Nigerians engage in a mass exodus to other countries for medical treatment that has been estimated to cost us as much as $1Billion per annum.
As though prompted by the same malady, doctors and other healthcare workers have continued to leave the country in drones. The home environment has been left near desolate. So serious is this situation that it remains the greatest threat to our healthcare system. The tension is at breaking point but seems not observed or noticed from the comfort zone of the PRIVILEGED, especially, our leadership. We have witnessed our health insurance scheme grandstand through the years and failing in its envisaged obligations to the Nigerian people. We have seen a neglected private sector of our healthcare delivery system that has left it a solo struggle and offers no promise beyond the catastrophe that we face in socio-economic scarcity, limitations, minimal performance and hopelessness.
We have witnessed a general decline in capacity and infrastructure and the yawning gap in our local preparedness that has taken away the sprint of competitiveness from us in the community of healthcare nations. We have witnessed the Nigerian healthcare system that was ranked amongst the top three in Africa and the destination choice of the Saudi Arabian Monarch and his family in the 80s deplete to an amorphous caricature of its old form today. The analysis is serially inexhaustible.
It is for these and other threats to our healthcare system that we have invited you to this town hall assembly of the Nigerian people, the private sector operators to share your experience and forge a path out of the woods for our healthcare delivery system. The private sector of is the highest consumer as well as the largest providers of healthcare in Nigeria.
This strongly underscores the need for this dialogue. One of the cardinal objectives for this dialogue is to spotlight the place of the private health sector in the healthcare delivery architecture and chemistry. They are the inevitable partners of government and should be seen in the light of the huge gap they fill in the system rather than be perceived by government as competitors or treated with disdain. They need to be supported and encouraged to optimize their immense potentials for the system.
The private sector has demonstrated that it is the present strength of our health system. The future of healthcare in Nigeria is the private sector. The best in our country today is in the private sector despite the near lack of support. All it needs is the enabling environment.
May I inform Nigerians and the international community that the health sector of Nigeria with over 200 million people and a potentially viable economy and deep natural endowments, is a huge investment location. I therefore call on our businessmen and women, local and international investors to invest in the health sector and invest in the private doctors.
Distinguished audience, the Association of General And Private Medical Practitioners of Nigerian, (AGPMPN) the host of this event is the umbrella body of Nigerian Private Doctors. We are the largest providers of healthcare in Nigeria, the biggest partners of government at the states and federal levels. We are the providers of over 70% of the healthcare needs of Nigerians and we have the widest spread and reach to the people.
Our association is 100 years this year having been founded in 1921. As part of marking the great milestone of a centenary, we have decided to partner with stakeholders and Nigerians to rise to support the efforts of our government to improve the nation’s healthcare delivery. We desire this especially to support maternal and child care and temper their very high mortality rates that have become a moral national burden.
We want to build capacity across the largely ill equipped care givers in our rural communities, improve the quality of care to our pregnant mothers,
save their lives and save the lives of their children. We project to save one million Nigerian women and children over the next five years. This is the
SAVE ONE MILLION NIGERIAN MOTHERS INITIATIVE.In like manner, we desire also to grow awareness, understanding, acceptance and support for health insurance by the Nigerian people as a means for actualizing Universal Health Coverage by 2030. This is our AGPMPN AWAKE NIGERIA PROJECT 2030. It is a nationwide media publicity engagement to educate 100 million Nigerians in 5 years.
This is why we have reached out to you and are still reaching out to charitable Nigerians and residents and organizations, patrons of healthcare, friends at home and abroad, to donate to the PRIVATE SECTOR HEALTHCARE INTERVENTION TRUST FUND, the reason for the launching of today.
On behalf of the Nigerian Private Doctors, their leadership and trustees, and with every sense of humility, I appeal to you to identify with this great cause, a Nigerian project to save Nigeria. It is our wish that at the end of this exercise, a private sector perspective on the question of our healthcare delivery system will be articulated in a communiqué. Such an action blueprint will be activated through integrated advocacy to influence the policy thrust in the health system.
In concluding, let me observe that in calling for your support, we are not unaware of the times in which we are. They are unusual and they are daring but every season has got its best side. The stars are brightest when the night is darkest. Let the best of us show in this dark hour for there is no better time than now to act.
We want to build a partnership with you and with the Nigerian people to stand by our government. No government, no matter how rich or powerful can do it alone. Our government needs us. Our people need us. Invest in us to champion the cause of the Nigerian mothers and child and we will not disappoint your expectations of us.
Thank you for the honour of your presence and for your magnanimity in supporting our project. Our country Nigeria will be better for this vision and we will be proud to have been part of that history.
Thank you and God bless you.
God bless Nigerian women!
God bless Nigerian children!!
God bless Nigerians!!!
.• Dr. Odo is the President, Association of General and Private Medical Practitioners of Nigeria.