By Azoma Chikwe
The Lagos State Government, through its Health Facility Monitoring and Accreditation Agency (HEFAMAA), has sealed the Empire Medical Centre located at 10, Soyebo Street, Ikorodu and arrested the proprietor of the facility, Mr Onumoh Eleazer for offences bordering on quackery.
The state’s Commissioner for Health, Dr. Jide Idris, who disclosed this in Lagos early this week, noted that the closure of the facility was coming on the heels of similar monitoring and closure exercise being carried out by the agency in recent times to regulate and sanitise the operations of health facilities within the State and ensure that quackery is totally eradicated in the health sector.
Speaking on the same issue, the Special Adviser to the Governor on Primary Health Care, Dr. Olufemi Onanuga explained that the Ministry of Health having received reports of quackery about the facility from concerned and well-meaning citizens carried out a thorough investigation which indicated that the proprietor in charge of the facility performs surgical procedures on innocent and unsuspecting patients without a certificate and practicing license.
Onanuga disclosed that the culprit, Mr Onumoh Eleazer had recently performed surgical operations on three out of the seven patients admitted in his facility before HEFAMAA arrested him and shut down the facility, stressing that all patients found there have been transferred to General Hospital Ikorodu for proper management.
Mr Onumoh Eleazer who claimed to have studied Medicine in the Dominican Republic but could not collect his certificate for financial reasons confessed to ‘training’ under one Dr. Godwin Kanu , a retired consultant traumatologist and orthopedist, for 14 years after his return to the country and since then had been practising medicine.