Thought Leadership

My Chief – The Honourable Minister of Health

5 Mins read

In 1996, I started my one year housemanship programme in an unlikely location;  Abia State University Teaching Hospital (ABSUTH), Aba. While not necessarily renowned for its academic or clinical excellence at the time, the hospital in its early years of becoming a teaching hospital had sought some excellent, young, enthusiastic consultants to drive its clinical evolution. Unlike the older teaching hospitals, with large cadres of doctors in training, in Aba – it was the house officers, a few medical officers and the consultants who provided care. So we worked hard, had a lot of responsibility, but we learnt a lot, very fast. While at Aba, I was lucky enough to work with 3 consultants whose work ethic, ethos and attitude shaped the rest of my career. Just as I was starting my first medical job, they were starting their first consultant positions. These 3 colleagues were Dr C Adisa, Dr C Kamanu and Dr Onyebuchi Chukwu.  Dr Chukwu left Aba in 2000 for  Ebonyi State University Teaching Hospital, Abakaliki, where he was appointed Professor in 2007, as well as being Chief Medical Director/Chief Executive Officer between 2003 and 2008. In April 2010, he was appointed Minister of Health for the Federal Republic of Nigeria and reappointed in July 2011.

In medical practice in eastern Nigeria (and this might be the norm across the country) we refer to our professional seniors as “Chief”. In the context it is used, it is an incredibly powerful word. It confers respect while maintaining an informal undertone fulfilling two important constructs in clinical practice – acknowledgement of clinical seniority while maintaining collegial friendliness….but I digress. Those of us that passed through Prof Chukwu’s tutelage in ABSUTH, will surely agree with me on his clinical qualities, integrity and respect for the patient – even in the often difficult circumstances we faced in Aba. However, there are two areas that I am not yet in a position to offer a great deal of insight into (as it was too early professionally to think about these at the time) – his managerial skills and professional courage. But, for the sake of 150 million Nigerians, I hope that he these in the bag too. These two factors will be, in my mind, the most important attributes that will be needed for him to succeed as Minister of Health in our Federal Republic.

I will not bore you with an account of the state of affairs of our health sector. Follow us on Twitter @nighealthwatch to read the continuous stream of tales of woe from Nigerians that have had to access our public sector health services at all levels. It is difficult to understand how things were left to get this bad. Our facilities are in a mess, colleagues are disenfranchised, 30% of our medical schools have had their accreditation withdrawn by the Medical council. Our previous president did not hide his lack of confidence in our health sector in the last few months of his life, importing even the ambulance that took him on his last journey from Abuja International Airport to the State House in Abuja. Our capital city has no functional emergency medical response service. Eighty percent of all the funds allocated to the health sector in our country goes to a handful of tertiary care facilities, while we pay lip service to primary health care. Health care professionals are constantly on strike as they jostle for more pay and status. Our National Health Insurance Scheme has not managed to cover up to 2% of Nigerians in its 20 years of existence and our National Agency for the Control of AIDS only funds treatment for 5% of patients on antiretrovirals in Nigeria, as we leave the rest to the benevolence of the US President’s Emergency Fund for AIDS (PEPFAR). After 8 years of crawling through our tortuous legislative process,  the  “new” National Health Bill has eluded presidential accent. Things are so bad that Professor Chukwu said in his own screening process by our Senate that our pride and joy – the National Hospital in Abuja is a “National Hospital” in name only. Alas, I did promise not to bore you with the state of affairs in our health sector.

But we must not just complain, but also offer solutions.

Management 

It is my contention that the biggest challenge facing our health sector is not equipment, infrastructure, money or human resources, but  its management. The managers of our health sector have been making breathtakingly bad decisions. Our managers spend years negotiating pay packages for health care professionals with no contracts relating to what these professionals are expected to deliver for their salaries. Our hospitals are managed without any clinical or financial performance indicators or targets, or metrics of performance. With no functional data management system and no referral system, management is blind and based on instinct. In the past 8 years several contracts running into billions of naira have been granted for the procurement of CT scanners, MRI scanners. A particularly painful example was the procurement of a linear accelerator- a piece of equipment that costs about $5million – N750,000,000 (not including installation, or contract inflation) delivered to my alma mater: the University of Nigeria Teaching Hospital (UNTH), Enugu. A linear accelerator (like the one in the above photo) is used to deliver radiotherapy, a method of treating cancerous tumours by targeted beams of radiation which can rotate around the patient’s body to deliver the radiation from different angles. This ‘investment’ in UNTH has never functioned…ever. It has been serially vandalized and its shell still lies there, tucked away in a room in Ituku Ozalla. I can imagine that the story is not different for many other centres. The opportunity cost of failures like this is simple – people die. Not just from the cancers that this would have treated, but of ‘simple’ things like bleeding during labour for lack of blood, or lack of oxygen in our theatres because the money that would have been used for this was spent on the linear accelerator. Management is our greatest challenge.

Courage
As bad as things are,there lies the greatest opportunity one can hope for in the health sector in Nigeria – to be the leader that turned this ship around. But it will take courage….lots of it. The health sector has unions that have the toughest bargaining chip available to mankind – the ability to take lives by not working. No other profession has such power. It is because of this that we, doctors take oaths to above everything “do no harm” on graduation from medical school, and it is because of this that you so rarely hear of health professionals striking in other countries in the world. Not so in our Nigeria. There will be strikes and counter strikes as the health professionals fight over a few dollars more and status. Appointments of Chief Medical Directors of our Teaching Hospitals are almost akin to gubernatorial elections. Campaigns start years in advance as teaching hospitals divide along interests, ethnicity and privilege. Prayer ses
sions are held and Babalawos are visited.  The sector will resist change and resist vehemently.
It will take courage, lots of it.

Herein lies the challenge my Chief faces. He has a great challenge and a great opportunity. We will continue to celebrate him as we did in Aba, but this time it will take more that integrity and clinical excellence – it will also take clear management, leadership and courage. We wish him and Nigeria well.

http://www.nigeriahealthwatch.com/

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed people can change the world; indeed it is the only thing that ever has…Margaret Mead

Related posts
Thought Leadership

Data is life: Achieving Nigeria's Digital-in-Health Approach

4 Mins read
Data and technology play a crucial role in the healthcare sector. The advent of technological innovations, including artificial intelligence, telemedicine, and mobile…
Thought Leadership

Navigating Nigeria’s Healthcare Landscape: Opportunities, Challenges, and Strategic Partnerships

4 Mins read
Chukwuemeka Oguanuo (Lead writer) Nigeria is the most populous country in Africa with over 200 million people — a number that is projected to…
Thought Leadership

Developing a Climate Resilient WASH Policy in Nigeria Come Rain or Drought

3 Mins read
In 2018, the Federal Government of Nigeria developed a 13-year strategy to address the WASH crisis in the country. Five years post-implementation,…

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *