An expert and orthopaedic surgeon consultant, Dr. Christopher Otabo has called on government-owned hospitals in Nigeria to seek to collaborate with private hospitals for the quality healthcare needs of Nigerians.
Otabo noted that there should not be competition between public and privately owned hospitals, rather there should be collaboration as the goal is to save lives not which hospital is doing better than others.
Otabo who is the Medical Director of Alliance Hospital in Abuja made the call during a courtesy visit paid to the hospital by the Association of Nigerian Health Journalists (ANHEJ).
According to him: “Unfortunately over the years, what we find is that the government institutions are in competition with the private sector instead of collaboration and that is injuring the healthcare system.
While citing instances, he said, up until recently, it was only last month or two months ago that for the first time,
he saw a letterhead referral from a National Hospital writing consultant or orthopaedic surgeon in Alliance Hospital.
“What used to happen is patients get dissatisfied and leave. The best the doctors could do at that time was, say well, you can go to an Alliance Hospital but we can give you a referral because it is against their ethics because they see us as competitors rather than collaborators.”
“Every week, we received like one or two patients from National Hospital from either a person who got angry and left or the surgeons will say you know what we can do it go to Alliance, that’s a weekly occurrence.” He said
Otabo further noted that the reason public hospitals cannot do a referral was because of the attitude of competition instead of collaboration over the years.
“Government has shown over the years that they are inefficient in managing resources. The private sector can come with the money in terms of the public-private partnership arrangement”
Two years ago, I wrote a letter to the Secretary of Health in FCT. I discuss this with my partners in China. I said that there is no MRI machine in the whole of the FCT hospitals. Let’s assume there’s no federal presence. The only MRI machine we have is in the National Hospital.
The only other places are Alliances and of course, we have a few other private hospitals. Only a national hospital has MRI among like 20 big government hospitals.
“So I wrote to the commissioner of health and said let’s go into partnership, I want to supply MRI machines to as many hospitals in FCT as possible.”
“You will get the percentage, me and my Chinese partner will get a percentage. That letter did not see the light of the day.”
“By now, we should have had like five MRI machines. I’m into business. I get my cut you get yours too and we will run it.
“You don’t even need to pay for maintenance. The maintenance would be on us. You probably take just take 30% for providing the space and providing the patient, the remaining 70% comes to those who funded the machine and those who will be maintaining it. But they never approved it and there’s still no MRI machine.