Expert urges improved facilities at medical institutions

President of the National Postgraduate Medical College of Nigeria, Prof. Rasheed Arogundade, has urged governments at different levels to provide modern equipment to medical institutions across the country, as a way of tackling the challenges facing the health sector.

He is also canvassing adequate training of medical students and professionals in order to enthrone excellence.

Delivering his inaugural lecture, titled, “The Detective in a Radiologist,” at the University of Lagos (UNILAG), Akoka, recently, Arogundade, who is also a professor of radiology, said the focus of government has always been on the hospitals, to the detriment of the medical colleges, where the human resources are produced for the nation’s health sector.

He lamented that most medical graduates from Nigeria were usually challenged overseas when confronted with modern facilities, adding that obsolete facilities being deployed in their schools back home, have hindered their professional expertise in no small measure.

He noted that the frequent overseas visits by wealthy Nigerians for medical attention, was as a result of the distrust in the nation’s health sector. The challenge, he said can be addressed with massive investment in medical education within the country.

His words, “The solution to the myriad of challenges facing us as a nation is that government should pump a lot of money into education and medical education in particular. They currently don’t allocate enough funds to the education sector and that is why the equipment we are supposed to be using to teach are not there. Most of our students who go abroad usually start afresh because they were more concerned with theories here, without adequate practical experience. So by the time they see the facilities out there, they begin to use them afresh.

“The degree with which an expert is very precise in making a correct diagnosis is a function of training, and once you are well-trained to the extent that you are consultable, it makes a lot of difference, and 99 per cent of the time you are going to be very correct. Though, there is no perfect human being, it is only nature that is perfect, but with adequate training and proper equipment, you will make the right diagnosis.”

He said if health professionals in the country were given equal opportunities, they would perform optimally like their international counterparts.

“If we are working on the same terrain, no brain is better than the other. The brain of the blacks isn’t better than that of the whites and vice versa. So we can all do the same thing and achieve the same result. So my appeal is that the appropriate authorities should allocate more funding to the education sector, both at the higher and the lower levels so that we can develop at par.”

He also appealed to the management of UNILAG to separate the Department of Clinical Radiology from radiotherapy, otherwise known as Clinical Oncology, “as the two do not represent the same side of a coin.”