Kogiflame
Provost College of Health Sciences, University of Lokoja, Prof. Michael Ozovehe Ogirima has called on the Federal government to extend TETFUND to the Teaching hospital as these are the training and research centres for medical students and postgraduate students.
He made this known during the 32nd inaugural lecture titled: Improvising To Greatness: “The Surgeon’s Sojourn” which took place at the Federal University Lokoja.
The Orthopedic surgeon stressed that the cumulative investment in education and health is still far from the expected UNICEF and WHO/AU benchmarks of 26% and 15% of annual budgets respectively.
He noted that funding of research activities to set up research laboratory at the level of the departments is herculean, without molecular inquests in medical researches, more research grants are not easy to come by these days.
His words, “Brain drain is a phenomenal problem of the decade. Medical academics are leaving the country in droves. This is not limited to young ones but old and experienced hands. It is costing the country huge amount of money. This cohabits with high rate of medical tourism
“The teaching hospitals are not adequately funded or supervised. There is relative neglect because they belong to the Ministry of Health while the University is under the NUC/Ministry of Education. We, the clinical staff, are caught in between two poorly funded supervisors-a double jeopardy. The patients being our obedient “guinea pigs” cannot be subjected to risky experiments without ethical issues.
“However, if this is not possible, special medical education trust fund should be put in place to take care of our poorly equipped health centres. There is a need to enforce various existing policies on health insurance and social welfare schemes for the institutions and the vulnerable.
” Government is encouraged to establish more specialized universities as there is always competitive funding among various programmes in the university. The medical programmes are expensive to run and the tendency for neglect and underfunding exist. It is recommended that the medical education of any university should have between 30 to 40% of the annual capital budget of that institution.
“Clustering of medical colleges may be necessary to make available the few medical teachers in the country accessible to students through utilization of ICT and e-learning facilities and Al assisted tools. A medical college could therefore be affiliated to many teaching hospitals and well-equipped private hospitals.
