FG, states must stop quacks in medical profession — Oshiomhole

From EBEN ENASCO KINGSLEY, Benin City

GOVERNOR Adams Oshiomhole has advocated that the state and the federal governments should work together to fight medical quackery in the country.
The governor, who made this suggestion when the Minister of State, Health, Dr Oagie Ehanire called on him in his office, noted that the menace of quackery in the medical profession had assumed embarrassing dimensions and there was urgent need to sanitise and build a reputable medical profession.
According to him, under the change mantra of the present administration, the federal and state governments must collaborate to fight quackery in the profession.
“ I want to assure you, the present government of President Muhammadu Buhari commands the desired confidence in the minds of Nigerians to do what is right and put the nation back on the right track,” he said, pointing out that “we must revisit the issue of regulation which will spell out the minimum requirement you must meet to establish a hospital and a private clinic.
For instance, he said, clinics that ought to, at best, function as a referral centre should only hear complaints and refer patients to the appropriate hospitals, whereas what we have today is a situation whereby one doctor, a general doctor, performs the role of a gynecologist, neurologist, dentist, eye surgeon and all sorts of things and the result is that a lot of cases that could have been managed quietly get complicated before they are referred to the right hospitals.
“Between the federal and state governments, I think we need to have a dialogue and see how we can review the laws in regard to minimum requirements to establish a private hospital and the limit to what a private hospital can do. There are too many quacks who masquerade as doctors.
“You must have found it quite embarrassing that even in the Federal Ministry of Health, under the previous government, a fake doctor was functioning in the Ministry of Health, getting promotions and contributing to public policy formulation and it took a couple of years before it was found out that he was never a doctor.
“It shows how rotten everything had become that somebody, not in my village, but in Abuja, was hiding and purporting to be a doctor at the Ministry of Health headquarters under the supervision of Professors who have been ministers and Chief Medical Directors of the federation.
“Too many things have gone wrong but as I have always told our people, our party is not in power to lament but to learn the right lessons and to confront those issues squarely and build a new Nigeria from the ashes of the old and to give our people confidence and restore integrity to public institutions whether it is health care, education, and others.
“As state authority with the support of the Federal Ministry of Health, we can ensure that quacks are completely removed from the practice of medicine.”