Adekunle Yusuf
The founder, Flying Doctors Nigeria, Dr. Ola Brown, has commended the Federal Government on the ease of doing business, saying the “visa-on-arrival policy has changed the way my business runs forever”.
She expressed joy over the Lit subnational tour organised by the Presidential Enabling Business Environment Council (PEBEC) and the Lagos State Government, which held in Lagos.
“For me, visa-on-arrival has changed the way my business runs forever. Flying Doctors Nigeria, like every air ambulance service in the world, is focused on moving patients from an area where there is an overwhelmed level of care to a more suitable level of care. And every year, there is this kind of pilgrimage that goes to the mountain in Chad to look at some historic things that I haven’t properly researched, but they do a lot of mountain climbing in Chad and there are always accidents.
“So, can you imagine, trying to move an American or a European into a Nigerian hospital? You have to move them to the centre of Chad first and wait two days for a visa there while the patients are in critical condition before you can get them into Nigeria. And now we can fly directly there and bring them straight into Lagos, they get their visa on arrival when they get to Lagos and we can take them to hospital and I will tell you what that does.
“Each of these patients is an intensive care patient; they spend around $50, 000 each. So, you can imagine if we are bringing one thousand to five thousand of those patients every year into Lagos. It just props up my business. The business services are making money because now they are making money from their charges when they issue visa. The hospitals are making money; the doctors can be paid better salaries. Even sometimes the relatives have to fly in to stay in hotels in Lagos. So, it is a really huge boost to the economy,” she said.
Brown also advised professionals in various disciplines to imbibe entrepreneurial skills, saying it is the only key that can open success doors for them in their callings. It is one thing to be professionally sound, but a different ball game to run the business aspects of various disciplines successfully, she noted. “For my personal challenges in my entrepreneurial journey, they actually haven’t been government related. I think the biggest challenges have been ‘me’ related and culturally as well. So as I was growing up, my parents and I’m sure all of our parents were all used to be a doctor, study engineering, study accounting. So, coming home to the Nigerian context and starting a business was actually quite difficult because I didn’t know very much about business, I didn’t know what I needed to do to get a loan from the bank.
“I thought that medicine and clinical practice prepared me for all the challenges. And if you look at it, the first air ambulance service in the world was started by a pastor. Dangote is not a chemical structural limestone engineer or some kind of scientist that knows about the science of creating cement. He’s an entrepreneur and I think that if we can start to adjust that entrepreneurial culture alongside our professional skills, that would make business a lot easier for us,” she said.
Drawing from her experience, Brown recalled that she had a most challenging experience at the early stage of her business life when she flew a patient from Nigeria to the United Kingdom for medical care.
“I once transferred a patient to the UK for treatment and the patient ended up not paying the bills and I ended up being sanctioned because of it. It wasn’t a problem with my medical skills; it was a problem with my business skills and I was fully reinstated after the sanction, but that painful period taught me that being skilled at the technical work of your profession is different from being skilled at the business of your profession,” she recalled.
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