The criticality of the medical profession to society is underscored by the use of the parameter of life expectancy by the World Health Organization, WHO, as a development index of the people. Before the discovery of modern medicine, life was fleeting and the environment was replete with a lot of diseases and medical challenges. The indispensability of the medical doctor is again highlighted in humanity’s desire to constantly push the boundaries of medical technology by modern medical research. Therefore, forming the substructure of the public health sector edifice, are medical doctors whose professional and ethical exertions on the health challenges of society, will forever remain invaluable. It is because of this that this piece has zeroed in on the abysmal statistical ratio of doctor to people and the alarming rate of attrition even among the unimpressive number of the trained local doctors. This is done with a view to highlighting the emergence of a local medical training university surrounded by state-of-the-art facilities that will start turning out highly trained doctors in a couple of years!
At the currently prescribed World Health Organization (WHO) ratio of 1:600 (one doctor to every six hundred persons) as against Nigeria’s 1:4,000 (one doctor to every four thousand persons), it becomes compulsory to increase the number of medical doctors from its present 36,000 to the desired figure of 237,000 in order to meet the myriad challenges in the national health sector. Although many more medical doctors have been trained by the available medical schools in Nigeria, a lot of them have left for greener pastures due to lack of self-actualization occasioned by inadequate job fulfillment within an unrewarding and unresponsive health sector.
The loss of confidence in domestic medical health care services –- itself, a combination of a Nigerian psychological complex for anything foreign and past governments’ failures to properly reform the health sector at the secondary and tertiary health care levels –- has cost the nation very dearly on foreign medical trips yearly. The economic fallout from foreign medical tourism has been so enormous that from the 5,000 people that travel out monthly to India and sundry countries, Nigeria loses $500 million annually with India alone, accounting for $260 million of the cash flight!
These were the informing reasons for the Ondo State government in 2015, to establish the University of Medical Sciences in Laje, Ondo city, as a citadel of medical education to offer services of specialized facilities for medical training and research. In trying to make the university a complementing arm of medical education to an already established array of medical facilities in the area, it was expected that the further development of medicine would be served by the synergy of a mutually reinforcing relationship between the school and the surrounding medical facilities where the former uses its academic medical training and research to complement the latter’s virtually limitless possibilities in practical application.
Offering these virtually limitless possibilities in practical medical application, has been what is now referred to as the Laje Medical Complex in Ondo city; a veritable resort of local medical tourism, comprising the Gani Fawehinmi Diagnostic Centre; Mother & Child Hospital, one of the busiest maternity hospitals in Nigeria; the Accident & Emergency Services Hospital (Trauma Centre), accredited by the National Postgraduate Medical College in less than 3 years of operation for post graduate training in General Surgery, Orthopaedic Surgery and Radiology; the Call Centre and Kidney Care Centre, a state-of-the-art facility with just about the highest simultaneous functional capability for the most dialysis sessions in the country!
Expectedly, the first set of doctors and dentists will graduate in the year 2019. Not only has the University of Medical Sciences, Laje, Ondo, been accredited by the National Universities Commission and the Nigeria Medical Council, the school, as a result of the application of modern techniques in the teaching of medicine, has become virtually the first choice for students in medical education training curricula. The rash of academic strikes by lecturers and closure of schools normally endemic in the Nigerian university system, have not hit the school probably because it’s staff are not yet members of the Academic Staff Union of Nigeria Universities, ASUU, and again, because of the school’s leadership culture of accountability, transparency and consensual decision making.
An investment in good training schools for medical practitioners –- either by the government or private sector –- to increase the number of doctors and have the proper ratio of doctor to people and to acquaint medical personnel with the latest techniques in 21st-century medical technology will be a solid base upon which all other specialists in public/private health care management would be expected to build on.
Taoheed Ajao was Senior Special Assistant on Public Communication in the former administration of Dr. Olusegun Mimiko in Ondo State and now, Executive Director of Milestone Communications, Ikeja, Lagos.