The opening of a cardiac and renal centre by the Lagos State government may signal the end of overseas treatment for Nigerians suffering from heart attack and similar health challenges. MIRIAM EKENE-OKORO reports.
Not a few lives have been lost in Nigeria due to unavailability of modern health facilities and competent personnel to treat certain complicated diseases. While a few who could afford it travel overseas to seek medical attention for such health challenges as heart and kidney related diseases, thousands of others, helpless, are left to agonise over their conditions either praying for miracle healing or waiting patiently for death.
One of such was Ms Bisi Oladele (not real name) a school teacher in one of the private school in Lagos State. Highly loved by the students and school management because of her hard work and commitment that had seen many students graduate from the school in good grades, her dreams of pursuing a career in teaching was cut short by a disease that was difficult to treat in our clime.
As she battled with the problem later diagnosed as cardiac arrest, she had the hope that she could live longer to realise her dream if only she has access to treatment, but this was not to be as she eventually lost the battle for lack of access to funds to seek treatment outside the shores of the country.
All that experiences by many Nigerians, observers say would be a thing of the past with the unveiling of a Cardiac and Renal Centre at the Lagos State University Teaching Hospital Annex in the Gbagada axis of the state.
The facility which was designed to handle heart and kidney related disease also offers out-patient services, diagnostic services, ultrasound, CT scan, Echocardiography, Stress Electrocardiography, laboratory services, fluoroscopy, ocular investigation for complications from hypertension, diabetes and renal conditions, haemo -dialysis for acute and chronic kidney diseases with 24 dialysis machine, admission for all cardiac conditions that requires hospital stay, critical care in intensive care unit (ICU) and high dependency wards, cardiac catherization, non invasive cardiology, open heart surgery, renal surgery, nursing and diabetic services, rehabilitation services and corporate wellness program.
The contract to build the health facility was awarded in 2008 to Messrs Deaux project Limited, and it was completed with the capacity for 67-bed centre that sits on 2,317 square metres or24,792 square feet of land.
The design provides access to all floors by two bed lifts and a wide ramp which allows two trolleys to pass simultaneously. Fire/service stairways are provided at the side of the elevator and at the back of the building.
To manage the project, the Lagos State Government signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Renescor Health Limited Liability Partnership to run and manage the facility under a 5-year Operation and Management (O&M) concession renewable for another five year term subject to satisfactory performance and mutual agreement of the parties wherein the proponent will provide all of the healthcare services and total facilities management required for the value-engineering Renal and Cardiac Centre.
At the signing of the agreement, Lagos State Commissioner for Health, Dr. Jide Idris, noted that the government considered it appropriate and timely to have a befitting cardiac and renal centre due to the increasing number of patients presenting with end stage renal failure.
Idris who explained that cardiac and renal disease constituted a growing health burden globally, said there is what is called a triple jeopardy in the health sector, especially in Lagos and Nigeria which require efforts of stakeholders in State health system to address.
According to him, “We have what we call double jeopardy but now it is triple jeopardy in the sense that we do not only have problems with communicable diseases, we are now having problems with non-communicable diseases, and the third one has to do with mental health. But this project is trying to address the major aspect of the non-communicable disease burden.
“Not only that, we also do know that these two-disease burden jointly cause serious complications in people who have these problems; and once you have these problems, you have them for live if they are not properly treated”, Idris explained.
He said government had over the years earmarked, as part of its free health policy, quite a huge chunk of its budget to sponsor people abroad on various medical problem that could not be treated in the country where the needed expertise and facilities were not available, saying that it was the copulation of these factors that prompted the government to build the cardiac and renal centre.
“A copulation of these factors prompted the need for us to build facilities locally, find a way of staffing them locally to provide the needed services to treat people of these ailments, reduce the number of money we are spending to sponsor people abroad, and more importantly to build local capacity,” he added.
Idris also opined that setting up of the facility would help bring back home Nigerian medical specialists as a way of ‘brain gain’ to defeat the ‘brain drain’ phenomenon, lamenting that over the years, quite a number of indigenous medical personnel had left the country for greener pastures due to lack of infrastructure and facilities they could exhibit their skills with.
“We have over 2,000 specialists in the United States, similar number in Europe and Canada. And this is one way of brain gain instead of brain drain because if you establish a facility with the right equipment and infrastructure, we can use that to attract the specialists abroad back home where they can exhibit their expertise and at the same time build local capacity here. That was the basic underlining reason why we decided to embark on this project.”
He noted that the need to get a suitably qualified competent consortium that has the needed requirement to run the facility prompted the state to opt for a Public-Private Partnership, PPP, agreement through the office of Public-Private Partnership, adding that this aim resulted in the appointment of Renescor Health Limited Liability Partnership to run and manage the facility.
Commissioner for Finance, Mr. Ayo Gbeleyi said that the reason for opting for qualified competent consortium of medical professionals to manage the facility through a PPP initiative was due to dearth of appropriate competent staff in this environment and the highly specialized nature of the equipment and services to be rendered within the facility.
He said that the PPP office was quite convinced of the capabilities of the private managers, as they were expected to provide quality services in line with international best practices, promote medical tourism, provide training field to develop the capacity of state’s own health personnel and facilitate a gradual paradigm shift on dependence on foreigners with the skilled empowerment of local professionals.
The Managing Director of Renescor Health Limited Liability Partnership, Dr. Ladi Awosika commended the government for building the state-of-the-art facility which he described as first of its kind in Sub-Saharan Africa taking out South Africa and Angola.
He added that the Cardiac and Renal Centre has been built to very good specification as attested to by the specialists that had signed up with the company, saying that the centre has facility for telemedicine which would make every procedure going on in this facility to be reviewed by colleagues anywhere in the world, thereby ensuring that training and cutting edge facility therapy would be available at the facility.
Awosika explained that Messrs Renescour comprise mainly of Nigerians specialists who had been in the Diaspora and could not get any space to work in Nigeria, noting that when they saw what was on ground, they pledged to contribute their quota through the facility.
“As at today, we have about 200 Nigerian specialists who have signed on to be a part of this. Some of them have decided that it will not even be for money, rather they will take one or two week vacation to be at this centre to impact their knowledge and skills to the people of Lagos in particular and Nigeria in general,” he said.
Awosika noted that more facilities of the magnitude of the cardiac and renal centre is required in the State to be able to satisfy the demand of its more than 21 million residents and promote medical tourism in Lagos, pledging that his company would not let the State down.
