?Woos investors to high-end Medical service sector

About $10 billion is lost yearly to outbound medical tourism in Africa, with Nigeria accounting for $2 billion. The National President of the Nigerian Medical Association (NMA), Prof. Bala Mohammed Audu, who disclosed this at the association?s Healthcare and Medical Expo, with the theme ?Reversing Medical Tourism: Africans Investing in Africa?, yesterday in Abuja, said that developed countries would visit Nigeria to recruit doctors trained in Nigeria and practising in the country, while the political elites travel to those countries for medical treatment that is available at their own doorsteps due to lack of awareness.

According to Audu, the political elite in Nigeria seeking healthcare in other parts of the world does not negate the fact that those services are available in the country and are probably better than those they seek abroad.

Audu said: ?We also realize that there are people in other parts of the world who are looking for these services, and they go to other countries; they can actually come to Nigeria and get these services. We are not only going to reduce the number of Nigerians travelling to other countries to access these services, but we will also attract nationals from other countries to come to Nigeria to utilize these services. By the time we make it so competitive and they go abroad and the doctors they are seeing there are referring them back to Nigeria, then they know that they don?t have to go abroad again?.

The NMA president pointed out that in order to achieve that kind of high-end medical services that are of global standard, Nigeria needed to invest and create an enabling environment in terms of health financing, funding, particularly by creating that financial and economic core that makes the healthcare industry in Nigeria as competitive as what is obtainable in other parts of the world. He noted that most Nigerians who seek healthcare abroad do not go to public institutions but to high-end private sector institutions.

In his keynote address, the Chairman of the Conference and the Chancellor of Ekiti State University, Dr. Tunji Olowolafe, observed that Nigeria was already a medical tourism destination, stressing that while we lament outbound flights, patients were flying into the country, albeit in relatively small numbers. (The Guardian)

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