By: Gabriel Olawale
The Nigerian doctors in Diaspora under the umbrella of Association of Nigerian Physicians in the Americas, ANPA, has successfully carried out a series of surgical operations in Nigeria as a way of giving back to their home country and promote healthy living.
The exercise which ran for five days in Lagos witnessed pediatric surgery, anal operation, abdominal and breast surgery among others.
The President of ANPA, Dr. Johnson Adeyanju, who spoke during a dinner co-hosted by the Lagos State Ministry of Health, First Consultants Medical Centre and Channels Television, praised the Nigerian government and medical expert in the country for their timely response to the meningitis outbreak even as they called for a more proactive approach.
Adeyanju who explained that medical tourism was not only peculiar to Nigeria called for more investment in infrastructure, skill development and welfare of care providers.
“Some of the factors that promote medical tourism range from price, the technical capacity of the provider, the reputation of the institution that is providing medical tourism among other things. To turn the trend around, Nigeria needs to make available enough training centres for graduating physician to practise and people with good technical skills that can do some of the surgeries with state of the art technology.
Speaking on behalf of hosts, Mr. George Etomi said that the intervention of Nigerian doctors in the diaspora is timely and needs to be improved upon.
Etomi noted that the surgeries in different locations across Lagos State have shown that the country has quality personnel that can raise the standard of healthcare in the country to the point where people won’t need to rush abroad for care.
“We lose a lot of foreign exchange to other countries simply because we are not annexing our own qualified expert. I think this mission from ANPA will let the government know that this is the time to exploit our own expert that is within and outside country to improve the health of our people.
