The Lagos State Commissioner for Health, Akin Abayomi has said that the state government has restricted management of COVID-19 patients to the facilities of the state or federal government and not private facilities in the state.
“COVID-19 remains a public crisis and all public crises are managed and supervised by the Lagos state government and by extension the federal government of Nigeria,” Abayomi said.
The State Commissioner for Health, who spoke at a press briefing on COVID-19 held on Friday at the Bagauda Kaltho Press Centre, Alausa, Ikeja, Lagos added that every COVID-19 patient in the state must be known to the government for adequate data capturing.
“Every person with COVID-19 in Lagos State must be known to the government. If you are managing COVID-19 without government permission and we are not capturing you in our database, you are performing an illegal act according to the laws of Lagos State,” he warned.
Abayomi explained that if you want to manage COVID-19 in Lagos state, we are not saying you cannot. All you need to do is to submit an application and we will visit your hospital to ensure that you have the required equipment and specialised personnel to manage COVID-19.
“If you can demonstrate that you can do all these then we will give you the approval to manage the disease and information about every patient managed by the hospitals must be made available to us so that we can record it in our database,” he said.
The commissioner however, emphasised on how the state is planning on private sector partnership with the government in the management of COVID-19 pandemic.
He said: “We are doing this in two ways. First, we are engaging with private laboratories that want to partner with the government to carry out the test for COVID-19. We have identified several private laboratories that have the capacity to perform a COVID-19 test.
He stressed that COVID-19 test is very complicated and that it is not all laboratories that can do it, noting that it requires very sophisticated equipment and personnel that have specialised training; therefore it is not all laboratories that can do COVID-19 PCR test.
“It is only a handful of laboratories that have the equipment and required medical personnel that can perform the test accurately. As a result of that, the few laboratories that have volunteered to contribute to COVID-19 testing are going through screening to see if they perform the test they are going to come up with accurate results.
“When they have successfully gone through this process then we will give them validation and accreditation and then they can start testing on behalf of the government as private sector partners in COVID-19,” he said.
According to him, “For managing patients, we have accredited three private hospitals. One is already admitting patients and the other two will be admitting patients any moment from now.
“They have passed the biosecurity compliance test. They have made modifications to their hospitals so that their staff and other patients are not put in danger or exposed to a higher risk of contracting COVID-19.
“Those private hospitals have passed the test and we are just in the process of issuing them with accreditation certificate so that they can start managing COVID-19 patients in the private sector.”
Abayomi however said: “Even if you are managing COVID-19 in the private sector, it still comes under the supervision of the Lagos State government Ministry of Health.”
