Swiss Biostadt partners Siemens to bridge equipment gap in health market

In a bid to address equipment challenges in Nigeria’s health industry, Swiss Biostadt Limited, a leading medical equipment companyin Nigeria, has entered into an agreement with SiemensHealthcare (Pty) Limited.

The partnership is expected to provide SwissBiostadt  with the guidance it needs to establish its foothold and to develop strategic relationships with other business entities. With the support of Siemens, Swiss Biostadt will gain exclusive distribution rights to the international market.

It is expected that such collaboration will bring global recognition to SwissBiostadt’s pharmaceutical enterprise. Cosmas Maduka, chairman, Swiss Biostadt Limited, said he would turn the company into a leading Nigerian medical equipment company, making it one of the largest medical equipment companies in Nigeria. “My goal is to provide Nigerians with excellent quality medical equipment at affordable prices. I am very confident that working with Siemens will help me achieve this end,” Maduka said.

Maduka, who stated this at the partnership launch between Swiss Biostadt Limited and Siemens Healthcare in Abuja, said he has planned to take the product to every nook and cranny of the country.

Mark Flint, managing director, Siemens Healthcare Pty Limited,  said his company would now be  positioned to provide affordable sustainable healthcare solutions throughout Africa.

Isaac Adewole, Nigeria’s minister of health, said why most Nigerians travel aboard on medical tourism is because health sector  has poor human resources, technologies and infrastructure and therefore produces less in terms of outputs and outcome. He noted that demand for critical health services is very low as it is driven by a loss of confidence in a system infamous for poor services.

He said the present administration is developing leasing-type financing structures to accelerate capital investment in health to allow for more realistic costing. “We have developed a National ICT framework Policyguidelines, which will enable us to deploy a plethora of ICT-based solutions for the health sector. We have also done extensive analytical work on incentivising private sector investment in health sector,” he said.

Emma Ajayi, managing director, Swiss Biostadt Limited, said Nigeria has the resources and manpower to tackle most ailments ravaging citizens within the country, but regretted that government officials who are expected to patronise health facilities at home are now the ones flying out to India, USA and Europe for medical attention, thereby putting more pressure onthe country’s reserves.

He stated that over 95 percent of Nigerians who travel aboard for medical treatment go to India, lamenting the loss of several billions of naira in foreign exchange and thousands of jobs to other countries, amid growing restiveness among millions of unemployed youths in the country. “We lose billions of dollars every year to medical trips aboard. We have also lost a lot of people, not because we don’t have the expertise in the country,” he said.