5,000 Nigerians go to another country for treatment each month, claims Dr. Adeyeye Arigbabuwa of the Association of General and Private Medical Practitioners of Nigeria. The figures are said by him to come from several sources, but it is not clear on what those figures are based, so may be no more than a guess.
He explains, ”Why do people go for medical tourism? They go because they are looking for value; they are looking for quality and also affordability. While Nigeria has enormous potential in the medical field, the facilities needed to get value, quality and affordability are not available. We have the medical expertise but not hospitals that the average Nigerian can afford.’
The doctor suggests that the Nigeria Tourism Development Corporation claims that about 60,000 Nigerians each year go to Europe, Asia, America and other parts of the world, and that in 2012, Nigeria spent $260 million in India for medical care. However, neither of these figures can be traced to a reliable source; they have become ‘facts’ by endless repetition.
One politician has threatened to privatise key hospitals to check health tourism. The logic is that by doing so they can improve facilities and stop Nigerians going abroad for treatment. Federal Minister of Health, Professor Onyebuchi Chukwu says that the federal government is also setting up six tertiary facilities by 2015 and that the nation should attain universal health insurance coverage before embarking on privatising the hospitals to ensure that the cost of accessing healthcare would not be beyond the reach of most Nigerians, “If we make everything private, people cannot afford it; so, we need to be careful. I rather feel that we first get universal coverage, and then begin to privatise. By then, I am sure everybody can afford it. But then, this is my own personal opinion, not that of the ministry yet.”
It is not yet clear if the proposed privatization would apply to new private hospitals that had recently opened, after encouragement by a government unable to afford to build its own hospitals, and been funded by overseas investors or overseas hospital groups.
Chukwu disclosed that some federal hospitals already operated on a public/private partnership basis would not be affected. This includes the ultra-modern cardiac centre at University College Hospital, Ibadan, and Lagos State University Teaching Hospital (LASUTH).
Nigeria is not the only country impacted by outbound medical tourism, as the trend is a challenge to the entire sub-region and needs to be tackled through appropriate human resource, the West African College of Surgeons (WACS) has said. WACS president Professor Herve Yangni-Angate explains, “Integration of medical communities in West Africa is a big challenge which needs to be confronted.” What he suggests is that rather than each country working to solve medical availability problems, the 18 West African countries should work together to seek to divert money that goes to overseas hospitals, to building local hospitals and sharing specialist expertise and facilities between them.
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