Medical tourism costing Nigeria $1bn annually- Omatseye

President, Healthcare Federation of Nigeria (HFN), Clare Omatseye, Tuesday disclosed that a total of one billion dollars is lost annually to medical tourism in Nigeria, as she lamented limited investment in the nation’s healthcare system.

Speaking at an event in Lagos, Omatseye traced the failure of Nigeria’s health system to the medical tourism embarked upon by the most prominent Nigerians, noting that the country suffered from severe brain drain alongside ‘patients’ drain’.

She said, “In the last couple of decades, due to lack of investment in health care in our country, we have had a brain drain, where we have lost a lot of our good doctors. Currently, we are suffering from patients’ drain, where there is a lack of confidence in the sector, and people are now leaving for medical tourism, where we lose over one billion dollars annually.

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“There are about 37,000 Nigerian doctors in diaspora, with about 30,000 Nigerian doctors in the United States, and over 5,000 in the United Kingdom. We have almost equal number of doctors abroad that we have in country”.
Omatseye argued that to develop an advanced internal healthcare system, there was need to create an enabling environment for the private sector to thrive.

She said, “To achieve this, we need to create enabling environment; the two policies recently passed by the National Council for Health in Abakaliki, which include incentivising health care investment policy and the new public private partnership policy will make it easier to do business in Nigeria.

“It will make it easier for private sector partners with the public sector protecting their interest and give Nigerians access to quality health care.”

This disclosure is coming on the heels of President Muhammadu Buhari’s return to the country after spending an unprecedented 103 days in London on medical vacation following a previous 49-day stay earlier in the year, a development that attracted widespread criticism for setting a bad example by encouraging medical tourism instead of working towards bringing the nation’s healthcare system up to par with what obtained in advanced countries.

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