If the overall healthcare indices of Nigeria is to improve significantly, conscious and carefully planned efforts must be made to revitilise the nation’s primary healthcare system, the Immediate Past Secretary General of the Nigerian Medical Association, Dr Olumuyiwa Odusote.
Dr Odusote, who spoke in an exclusive interview with Pharmanews in Lagos, said a lot of primary healthcare centres in the country were non-functional thereby fuelling the current poor health indices which the country contends with.
According to him, if the primary healthcare is revamped and properly staffed, it will control the resurgence of diseases and ensure better outcomes, since most of the people who contribute to the country’s poor healthcare indices do so at the primary level.
“So if we revitalise the primary healthcare system, the health indices are going to improve” he said.
Odusote, a consultant orthopaedic surgeon noted that the ongoing fight against COVID-19 has exposed the inadequacy of the country’s healthcare infrastructure which healthcare practitioners have since been lamenting about.
He added that most of the steps being taken hastily now in the face of the pandemic were temporary measures which may not stand the test of time and called for sustainable long term approach towards addressing the nation’s overall healthcare challenges.
On how to sustain the current feat attained in Polio eradication in the country, Odusote advised “we need to improve surveillance, sustain immunisation so that any case can be picked up and treated.”
