By Gabriel Olawale

The Chief Medical Director, Lagos State University Teaching Hospital, LASUTH, Prof TokunboFabamwo has called on employers and employees to make the working environment as healthy as possible.

Fabamwo said that an unhealthy working environment can provoke some illnesses that are life-threatening and as such organisations must do everything within reach to ensure people derive job satisfaction.

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Speaking in Lagos during a 2-day annual retreat of the Nigeria Institute of Medical Research, NIMR, Fabamwo who was Guest Speaker said that every organisation needed to put in place health screening mechanism to ensure workers are screened regularly for their good health.

“If the working environment is not conducive, it can lead to loss of job satisfaction, reduce productivity, absenteeism, stress. When someone is stressed, it can lead to depression or other chronic illnesses such as hypertension, diabetes.

“The emphasis now is to make our working environment as healthy, safe and conducive as possible because we spend about one-third of our lives in the office. It is also good to have a regular health screening programme for your workers so that those found to be sick are put on treatment to avoid cases of sudden death.”

On his part, the Director-General of NIMR, Prof BabatundeSalako, said over the past few years,  the Institute has been focusing on communicable diseases such as tuberculosis, malaria, HIV among others but now attention will be more on non-communicable diseases which are seen to be overtaking infectious diseases.

“Nigeria is a typical African country, there is need to develop research in the area of non-communicable diseases and that will include diseases like hypertension, diabetes that cause cardiovascular disease and invent things like sickle cell anemia, cancer are diseases ravaging our people and cause as much death as communicable diseases do. We need to expand the area of research and therefore we need to recruit people who can man that area of research.

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“There is a general challenge for every agency everywhere in the world which is funding but in the last few years funding seems to have improved but mainly in the area of physical development and purchase of new equipment.

But the core area of research where researchers need funding to carry out research needs more support.

Salako said that to overcome some of these challenges, the institute has recently created the NIMR research foundation which will operate as public-private partnership., “It will interface with the private sector and get some concerned private individual to provide funds for research either generally or in the area of their own interest.

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