By Sola Ogundipe

AN intensified drive towards providing sustainable healthcare delivery in all ramifications has been embarked upon by Management and Board of the Lagos University Teaching Hospital (LUTH), Idi Araba, Lagos.

This is the springboard of a concept tagged “The New LUTH Initiative” – designed to promote private sector- driven approach to healthcare delivery in Nigeria.

In a chat with Good Health Weekly, Chairman , LUTH Board, Dr. Omotayo Dairo, observd that one of the problems of the nation’s health sector was the erosion of highly-trained medical specialists and sub specialists.

He lamented that the infrastructural ebb over the past 40 years had created a generational vacuum of adequate tertiary care in the country.

Justifying the initiative, Omotayo noted that overall performance of the health system in Nigeria was a direct consequence of the dismal situation at the secondary and tertiary healthcare levels.

“It follows, therefore, that for Nigeria to play a desirable role in the 21st Century and beyond in healthcare delivery, there has to be a paradigm shift in the concept of secondary and tertiary healthcare as practiced today.

“The New LUTH Initiative is, therefore, a patriotic response and a humanitarian calling, at this time in Nigeria’s history, to the pain and suffering of sick fellow countrymen and women, young and old, requiring tertiary care sparsely available anywhere in Nigeria.”

Further, Omotayo said the goal of the New LUTH Initiative “is to build an ultra-modern health care delivery centre, where the best health care services will be rendered using the most modern techniques and technologies to nurse patients back to health.”

He emphasised that the proposed health care facility had potential not just to significantly improve performance of the health care sector in the country, but a lay a firm foundation for further investments – foreign and local – in the Nigerian health care sector and accelerate previously stalled progress towards the health related Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).”

When completed, the innovation, is expected to deliver the best and arguably, the largest tertiary health care facility in sub Saharan Africa. It would render services from pin-hole surgery and multi-organ-transplants to hi-tech health care delivery procedure and air ambulance services, telemedicine, etc.