Dr Maymunah Kadiri is a psychiatrist and a psychotherapist, who proudly calls herself the celebrity shrink. In this interview with Dorcas Egede, she speaks on her private practice, management philosophy and lots more. Excerpts:
What informed your interest in establishing a psychiatric hospital?
I am a trained psychiatrist. To be a psychiatrist in Nigeria means you have to be a medical doctor, and this meant studying for six years. After which you had to go for one year housemanship training, the compulsory one year service, go back for what we call residency training to be a fellow of the National Postgraduate Medical College of Nigeria or fellow of the West African College of Physicians to be a specialist. For me I chose mental health. Mental health physicians are called psychiatrists. People before me graduated after all these years and were looking for job placements even as consultants. And I said to myself, this isn’t what I want to go through, so I started doing my research. I found out that about one out of every four Nigerian has mental-related issues. And that was according to the last census figure of 150 million Nigerians. Now, what this means is that about 20-25% of Nigerians will definitely need mental health services. Right now, we have one psychiatrist to one million Nigerians. And who are these people in private practice? We have few private psychiatric hospitals scattered around the country, and different psychiatry units in Teaching, general hospitals and federal medical centres. I noticed a big gap, and there were only very few private psychiatric hospitals. And being a trainee, a resident doctor in psychiatric hospital, Yaba, I saw people who came and said they preferred private care, and I didn’t know any private practitioner to refer them to. So, 18 months to the end of my residency programme, I told myself I had to do something to fill this gap, but I just couldn’t do it as a physician, I had to acquire business knowledge, so I began another round of research. I came across the Goldman Sachs 10,000 women project to train 10,000 women worldwide on business management. So, I applied and luckily I was selected.
I finished from Yaba, May 2012, I started my business that January of that year before I left, and by August I enrolled with Goldman Sachs. For me, the Goldman Sachs opportunity came at the right time for me to acquire the entrepreneurial skills to run the business. That’s how it all begun. I’ve received grants, won several awards, and the business is growing in the sense that I’m no longer like a normal physician running a hospital. Today, I’m a trained business woman running a well-structured medical practice.
What’s your typical day like?
With or without the alarm clock, I’m up at 4:30 am. I’m a mother of three, all below 13 years of age, so I start my day with school runs. I drop them off at their various schools and have some pep talks with them. We are living in a very challenging society and you must be able to harness every little free time you have with your children. By the time I drop them off at school, by 7:30 I’m back home. My typical working hours is between 10:00 am to 4:00 pm. But of course, when school resumes, it’s 10:00 am to 2:00 pm because I have to go and pick them up from school. But, I can be as early as 6:00 am in the office. Don’t forget that I’m a physician and anything can come up in form of an emergency, and I can work as late as 10:00, 11:00 pm, or even 1:00 am. And for me, Mondays are still part of my weekends; no meetings, I work on my write-ups for my blog, I visit friends if I have to. But if there’s an emergency, I schedule an appointment, but otherwise, I work at my pace on Mondays. I help people manage stress, so as much as possible I want to manage my own stress.
What’s the age range of your clientele?
Well, like I earlier said, one out of every four Nigerian has mental health issues. My clientele cuts across every age, from the very young to the very old. But right now, corporate organisations form my major clientele. Yes, they are the people that are exposed to stress on a daily basis. To see a psychiatrist or medical doctor isn’t all about you falling ill, it’s about learning to be aware of the warning signs. So, what we do now is organise employee awareness programmes to boost productivity, reduce risks, prevent accidents and of course, increase peak performance in the workplace. And we do a lot of preventive measures through the employee assistance programme being put in the workplace, and that has helped us. We also have some HMOs on board, and you know these are mostly run by private organisations. We deal with children as well. The different groups have different medical conditions, for the youths you see more of drug and substance abuse, for the middle class working group, we see more of stress and anxiety-related issues, for the elderly, we see dementia, depression; we see more of depression in women than the men, attempted suicide more in women than in men also. People need to understand that mental illnesses are real. People struggle with mental illnesses on a daily basis. Now, this is where the catch comes in, because when they are depressed and they don’t want to be known, they prefer to go to private instead of public hospitals, and that’s where we come in.
We carved our own niche for people who do not want to visit public facilities. So, we don’t only do it in our facility, we do home service. There are people who don’t even want to come into our own facility, they want to be attended to in their personal space. We bring in our staff and work with the person. Now, this kind of service has its own challenges, in the sense that we go to treat a patient in his comfort zone, so the structure will be a bit disorderly. But we have been able to handle some cases successfully. It’s something that we are passionate about and we want to make people understand that a lot of Nigerians need these services. People should be advised to seek help on mental health issues from the right sources at the right time and at the right place.
Do you micro-manage your staff or allow them run with the flow?
Micro-manage? No. We have job descriptions. It’s very key to lay down the job description for every staff. That really helps; and from inception, tell them what you want or what they’re expected to do. That way, if they are derailing or if you as an employer is derailing, you’ll know and do things right. I believe in a leadership that is transformational, leadership that will impact, not just talk down on people or be authoritarian. We try to create an enabling environment where people are able to express their full potentials, not trying to please you. My staff and I sit and brainstorm to proffer solutions to issues. This Road to Growth programme, for instance, we did it together. We have to grow together, such that even if they leave today, they have some level of business acumen and can stand on their own. Micro-managing people to an extent won’t work with me, the stress will even be too much for me. I want to be the visionary, or the founder, if you like, and not be so involved in it to the extent that everybody will leave it to me. I prefer to train my staff, it can be very draining and demanding, but in the end, it’s worth it. And trust me, I do not bother my good head about people leaving after I have trained them. Even if they leave, other people will come, and truth is, some of them might have been trained by other professionals.
How do you motivate your staff?
A lot of ways in the sense that, I begin with the little words of appreciation on a daily basis. Granted anger may threaten to set in on some occasions, but I have been able to manage my anger to a certain level, maybe because this is my area of expertise. I talk to myself, I train myself, I go for training, I get psychoanalysed before I do some of the therapies that I go for. So, I’ve been able to tell myself that when anger is building up I know how to manage it, such that my staff hardly see me angry, and I don’t address them in a feat of anger. If they go wrong, I make them see that they have gone wrong and that what they’ve done may not be tolerated in other places, such that they will see that they’ve actually gone out of line. Another way I give them incentives is through end of the year bonuses. We also have this platform whereby you bring in a client or patient and we give you some percentage as incentive. And if the client patronises for a particular period of time, you have an added percentage. We don’t have to do the direct marketing. We do not involve the staff just because of incentive, but it’s also a way for them to help create more awareness about mental health. They walk the walk and talk the talk. A staff can say to his neighbour, for instance, “this thing that’s wrong with you, I don’t think it’s just ordinary, I think you need to talk to someone who can help you mentally. You need to be psychoanalysed…”
When you have to discipline erring staff, do you use the carrot and stick approach?
Yes, I use the carrot and stick approach. Use persuasion when necessary and be firm when it comes. That is use one hand to spank them, while using the other to draw them close. The carrot and stick approach works well for me. You don’t just sack people because of something they did; you must have served them queries and warnings overtime. And if it so happens that they do not heed and you decide to sack them, they too will understand that they have earned it.
What’s your most memorable day since you set out into private practice?
Every day a patient looks at me and says, ‘this is doctor Kadri, my shrink’ that day is memorable. This is not something many of my patients like to admit. They prefer to see me as their friend because they believe that if they regard me as their doctor, it means they have issues. Also, when I get a referral by someone who patronised us and was satisfied with our services; that’s memorable for us.
How has the Cherie Blaire Foundation for Women helped you?
I’d say in a tremendous way because it came at the nick of time. Nick of time because we wanted to expand, and the programme was tailored towards financial empowerment, not just having the entrepreneurial skills. Every business is such that you want to grow, you want to impact life, and the programme came when we started thinking of expanding. We needed to know how to convince investors that they can invest in us, the bank that they can give us loans, we needed the financial literacy to move our business forward, this was when the Cherie Blair Foundation came. Now, I can tell you about account statements and cash flows, such that no accountant can bamboozle me with any financial jargon because the foundation has adequately equipped me with enough knowledge on managing my company’s finance. In fact, I cannot overemphasise the networking, acquiring new friends, sisters, partnership, alliances. I’m really grateful to Cherie Blair for taking this initiative to empower five hundred women, and we’re passionate about what we do, we will be at our best.
You’re a mum, a wife, a blogger, columnist, a shrink, how do you blend all of these activities?
I always say that I am the only Nigerian with the 10 Ps, which are, I am a physician, psychiatrist, psychotherapist, practitioner, I’m productive, purpose-driven, I’m a publisher, a professor in the making, in the sense that lecturing is my dream; and of course, I’m passionate about God and man.
