The hard lessons taught by Covid-19 disruption on the costly consequence of decades of healthcare neglect for all Nigerians may soon be lost in the excitement of access to foreign alternatives that international flights resumption promises, some health industry stakeholders fear.
The quick spread of the disease globally and the deadly impact on citizens of even countries with the most developed health facilities were forces that caged Nigeria’s elite within the shores of the country, forcing all and sundry to rely on the weak health system available.
Some of Nigeria’s top politicians, government functionaries and elites regrettably could not find standard hospitals to settle for within their immediate locale as they had to be whisked into Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial nerve. This is while the average Nigerians had to grapple with bouts of rejections from public hospitals that were ill-equipped to tackle the virus.
But as the international space sets to open September 5, stakeholders are worried that businesses might return to usual with the wealthy and powerful class preferring to attend to minor and major health needs overseas, while the public health system wallows in rot.
“The reality is that if the politicians and the comfortable people look at it well, they will realise that if you spoil your health system it affects everybody at the end of the day. I think that post-Covid-19, we should be more reasonable and try as much as possible to invest in healthcare,” Saliu Oseni, Nigeria Medical Association’s (NMA) national deputy secretary, told BusinessDay.
“The amount they use to take care of trivial cases overseas is probably enough to even start hospitals in some quarters. Quite a good number of the things they are trying to mage outside the country can be managed here,” Oseni said.
The medical doctor noted that medical tourism had continued to provide a soft landing, filling the gap of poor health structure for those at the top.
Since 2000, Nigeria’s government health expenditure saw its highest level at 7.3 percent of total government expenditure in 2006. From 5.3 percent in 2015, it plunged to 4.5 percent against the 2001 African Union agreement that member countries will commit at least 15 percent of their annual budget to improve the health sector.
For Akeem Olowofela, a resident doctor at the Federal Neuropsychiatric Hospital, Aro, Abeokuta, Ogun State, wasting the lessons from Covid-19 could amount to a huge loss of an experience that should trigger an overarching rehabilitation of the country’s health system for good. Healthcare access in Nigeria needs to grow to a level where basic services can be provided to the average Nigerians without a huge burden of out-of-pocket expenditure.
Olowofela lamented that the country’s hospitals were still few compared to the population seeking health services and were mostly handicapped by lack of improved equipment and expertise to provide prompt clinical intervention. While higher-cost alternatives are available in private hospitals and laboratories, Nigeria’s poor still find themselves at the mercy of cheaper public health centres where the dearth of bed spaces frequently stands between life and death.
“I have a friend in Georgia, USA, who had some health challenges and visited a particular community hospital with his wife. They did a test worth N30,000 free of charge. That is the kind of thing we don’t have in this country. Ordinary people cannot access what is basically good. And what is very good are quite very expensive. An ordinary general hospital is not equipped to do anything,” Olowofela said.
Nigeria needs to align efforts with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to reduce health inequality by ensuring people earn more to access better healthcare and quality of life, he said.
Among the considerations that place some countries ahead of others in terms of quality of life and human development is a well-developed public health system.
The UN last year highlighted that despite progress, the world is not on track to eradicate extreme deprivations in health and education by 2030, with 3 million children under age 5 still expected to die every year. This implies at least 850,000 above the SDG target. Nigeria may remain stuck in these grey zones if the neglect continues.
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