When Nelson Mandela, former president of South Africa, fell ill from a lung infection in 2013, he spent 87 days in a hospital in Pretoria, the country’s capital city.
He was 95 years old then and was monitored under the state’s best intensive care treatment.
But Nigeria’s President Muhammadu Buhari at 78, maintains a preference for foreign-based hospitals, snubbing growing local options that offer the quality of service at par with what is obtainable in some developed countries.
Even in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic that exposed the decades of rot in the public healthcare system and derelict security architecture, some institutional investors backed by huge private equity commitment saw what President Buhari has somehow managed to ignore and continued to pump billions into world-class facilities.
In a world where a renewed focus is placed on healthcare as an investment sector and technological advancement such as telemedicine are widening accessibility, Nigerian hospitals are stepping up with capital, equipment, manpower, and the grit for sustainability.
A special report by BusinessDay, mirroring over 20 of the best hospitals in Lagos taking the business of healthcare to global heights, shows that local options are available.
Download Report Here: The Business of Healthcare in Lagos: 20 Frontline Hospitals
Lagos, for instance, has not only experienced entry of new facilities, internationally known brands such as Evercare also dived in, just as the physical and operational expansion of familiar brands like Lagoon Hospitals, St Nicholas, Reddington, and Eko Hospitals went on.
Founded in 1968, St Nicholas Hospital in the heart of Lagos has maintained a visible presence in the private healthcare space in Lagos for almost six decades. Its main hospital is a 60-bed facility with a three-bedded Intensive Care Unit.
St Nicholas Hospital holds the unique distinction of having carried out almost 300 kidney transplants in its kidney transplant unit, by far the largest number in any facility in Nigeria – public or private, representing about 65 percent of all kidney transplants carried out in sub-Saharan Africa.
“Evacare is a part of an impact fund to create sustainable healthcare and that is why we invest in emerging markets,” Temi Marcella Awogboro, executive director, finance, admin and strategy of the hospital, said in an exclusive interview with BusinessDay.
“This is a patient long capital from leading financial institutions. The beauty is that the private equity that seats behind us has extensive experience in building and operating healthcare facility both in the developed market and in developing markets,” according to Awogboro.
There has also been an increasingly efficient targeting of niche areas and populations.
NEXT Haematology, for an example, is a high-tech health facility designed to provide specialised care based on ‘apheresis’ mainly to people with Sickle Cell anaemia.
Nigeria, India and the Democratic Republic of Congo have the largest populations of patients with Sickle Cell in the whole world.
Few lucky ones among the people living with the condition have had to travel abroad periodically to get specialised interventions.
But a young entrepreneurial haematologist took up the task and started a practice in this gap area, with a plan to scale up in order to provide even more specialised interventions such as bone marrow and stem cell transplantation.
Download Report Here: The Business of Healthcare in Lagos: 20 Frontline Hospitals
Despite these up-scaling events happening in the private healthcare space, the government leadership appears unready to indeed encourage the growth of local investment that it dearly craves.
President Buhari is currently on another routine medical trip that ironically coincides with an industrial strike action by the country’s health workers.
In stark reality, many ill Nigerians will face empty hospitals while the president is pampered in the loft comfort of a UK hospital.
Whereas the National Association of Resident Doctors are asking for things as basic as payment of owed salaries, better review of hazard allowance and training bills, among others.
“For you to write one specialist exam, you spend up to N2.5 million. We signed a Medical Residency Training Act, which says some stipend will be paid every year for us to write those exams. In 2019, nothing was paid. In 2020, epileptic payment was done. In 2021, our members are going in for exam again at the West African College of Physician and National Postgraduate College, and nothing has been paid to our members,” Julian Ojebo, former vice-president, Nigerian Association of Resident Doctors, explained during a morning radio show on Nigeria Info in Lagos.
Industry leaders say this president’s gesture counts as another clue for the exodus of more locally trained healthcare workers to countries with better welfare and working conditions.
For most Nigerians, President Buhari’s latest medical check-up is a sharp reminder to taxpayers that while they finance their leaders’ healthcare abroad, they will often get stuck with decrepit, ill-staffed government health facilities at home.
The 2020 health budget of Africa’s biggest oil-producing nation is the highest in five years (N440bn), but it amounts to a miserly 4.5 percent of the total government budget for the year, less than the 15 percent target the African Union had set for governments in 2001.
According to BudgiT, a civic organisation tracking government spending, a sizeable amount of the health budget is spent on recurrent expenditure and an insufficient amount is allocated towards capital projects.
Nigeria has just five hospital beds and not even one doctor for every 100,000 people, as opposed to an average of 35 beds and 24 doctors per 100,000 in South Africa, which has the continent’s most advanced medical care, according to a study by PricewaterhouseCoopers.
“You have to pay doctors and nurses well. You provide the equipment they can use to care if you don’t want to lose talents, and the onus lies on the government,” noted Kemi Ogunyemi, a Nigerian oncology nurse who returned after decades of service to the Royal Free Hospital, London.
