By Tosin Olatokunbo
After Nigerian health tourists spent a whopping N500 billion seeking medical treatment abroad last year, the Buhari’s government said it planned to end the anomaly soon.
This was disclosed by the Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed, who on Tuesday said the federal government is working to provide Nigerians with affordable world-class health facilities to end medical tourism and brain drain in the country.
In a country where health workers are not well remunerated, dearth of state of the art medical facilities in government owned hospitals resulting to incessant strikes in the sector, not a few insist that the target remained a tall dream.
The minister spoke barely a month after the Nigerian Medical Association, NMA said over 9,000 Nigerian medical doctors have left the country, within two years, seeking greener pastures abroad.
Top destinations for these doctors, the magazine has learnt are Saudi Arabia, United Kingdom, the United States and other European countries.
The emigration of the medical experts which the NMA said happened between 2016 and 2018, negatively impacted the nation’s health care system that only 4.7% of specialists were left to take care of Nigerians’ health issues.
NMA President, Professor Innocent Ujah, lamented in Abuja in April that the migration of Nigerian health professionals abroad has left only 4.7 per cent specialists to attend to Nigerian health problems.
But the minister said the situation will soon come to end, noting that that the intention of the federal government is to transformed the country into health hub for foreigners searching for good medical services.
Mohammed who spoke on Tuesday in Lagos at a media tour of Duchess International Hospital, also disclosed that part of the plan is to create more jobs in the health sector, apart from conserving Nigeria’s foreign reserves.
“We as a country will also conserve our foreign reserves while earning foreign exchange, we will begin to reverse the brain drain in the health sector; create jobs and provide affordable and standard healthcare for our people,” the minister said.
He stated further that, “It’s a new dawn for the health sector and we are proud of what Duchess and other healthcare facilities are doing in bringing about this new dawn.
The minister explained that the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN set up the N100 billion Healthcare Sector Intervention Fund, which was later expanded to N200 billion, in the wake of COVID 19 three years ago.
The intervention fund, he said, was to provide credit support for the healthcare sector through long-term, low-cost financing.
