Enugu State Governor Peter Mbah has said that the 300-bed Enugu International Hospital was not accidental but an idea he had conceived before his campaign to become the governor of the state.

Mbah explained that the conviction was borne from his understanding of the number of Nigerians and resources that leave the country for medical reasons.

Insisting that the Hospital which had advanced was a deliberate plan to establish a World-Class Medical Tourism and Advanced Healthcare Hub, the governor assured that his administration would do all to support the services at the facility.

Mbah, who was full of excitement after his pre-launch tour of the facility yesterday, said the state was now open to medical tourism as part of efforts to achieve his £30 billion economy within the administration’s eight years horizon.

He said:”This is not a facility that is knee-jerk or that was accidentally put here. If you recall, during our campaign for office, we made it clear and we were committed to making Enugu a medical tourism hub in the continent. We knew the size of that market.

“We knew also that we wanted to have a good chunk of that market. So what you’re saying here today, it’s a plan that had even been conceived before we started our campaign. And in our manifesto, if you go back to that manifesto and you flip through to the health care sector, you would also see there that we had conceived this much earlier than now to attract medical tourism. And we knew also that was never going to be wished into existence, that we needed to do concrete things. We needed to build a world-class facility and most importantly attract top-notch professionals that come here and provide the service”

Mbah said that with facilities installed at the hospital, and commitment to telemedicine, digital and electronic medical practice, “we can actually attract or even receive those opinions abroad and yet the money and the manpower would still remain here”.

On the affordability of services at the facility, Mbah assured that a fraction of what is paid to obtain topnotch healthcare at India, Turkey, United States, and United Kingdom by Nigerians would be charged at the place.

The governor disclosed that quite a good number of jobs would be created when the hospital becomes operational, adding that several professionals who left the country to practice overseas have indicated interest to work at the facility.

“We have received an outpour of interests of those people who were trained here at some point and now went overseas to practice and they are now happy to come back home and give back that gift that was nurtured here. They want to bring it back here. So we were excited about that in terms of job creation.

“This is going to create quite a whole lot of jobs. And you also know that this is not, again, an accident. If you look at our intervention in the healthcare sector, it’s been quite deliberate, very intentional, from the primary healthcare to the secondary, tertiary, and now maybe quaternary.

“So we have been very intentional to make sure that our people have access to quality healthcare. So we’re quite big on security and health care because we know that’s what investors would ask you”, he stressed

Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the hospital, Prof Sam Agwu said the Enugu International Hospital would provide advanced medicine and would attract experts in cancer, surgical, nuclear medicine, therapeutics and diagnostics among others.