From Kenechukwu Obiajuru, Yenagoa
Governor of Bayelsa State, Senator Douye Diri, has called on health institutions in Nigeria to look into modern trends in medical science such as biomedical engineering and emergency medicine as a means of stemming brain drain in the health sector.
He made the call on Thursday when the Ministerial Monitoring Committee of the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFUND) High+Impact Intervention in Medical Sciences paid a courtesy visit to Government House, Yenagoa.
Senator Diri, who was represented by his deputy, Senator Lawrence Ewhrudjakpo, described the subsisting medical practice in the country as still very traditional, insisting that the country can achieve better healthcare delivery with the right political will and commitment from all relevant stakeholders.
He noted that injecting biomedical engineering and emergency medicine into the medical institutions as well as improving medical infrastructure would dissuade many highly qualified medical professionals from leaving the country in search for greener pastures elsewhere.
Underscoring the importance of health and education, Governor Diri said his administration would not relent in injecting more resources to the two sectors with a view to improving the living standards of the people.
While expressing gratitude to the Minister of Education, and the Executive Secretary of the TETFUND for its intervention project at the Bayelsa Medical University (BMU), he assured the agency and other stakeholders of the state’s readiness for collaboration to improve infrastructure across all tertiary institutions in the state.
His words:” We are quite excited and we extend our appreciation and gratitude to the Minister of Education, and the Executive Secretary of the TETFUND for looking towards our direction. We have been looking for partnerships such as this to enable us do better.
“We are happy you are focused on an area we have a challenge. And I think that challenge is both self-imposed and exacerbated by greed in our country. But we are happy with what you are doing to retain health manpower in the country.
“Again, I think we should start looking at modern trends in medicine. In my opinion, we are still very traditional in our medical practice. There are new areas in medicine like biomedical engineering, which is an area we really need to look at.
“Because if we have CT Scan, MRI and the rest of them, yet we don’t have the biomedical engineers needed to fix these equipment, we will not achieve the desired progress in our health sector.
“Then we also have emergency medicine. If we inject these two areas into our current practice, it will give us the latitude to take care of a lot of people who would be swallowed up by the offering we will be giving.”
Speaking earlier, the leader of the TETFUND Ministerial Monitoring team to the state, Professor Saad Ahmed, said the special high-impact project for the revitalization of medical schools was initiated by the Federal Government as part of efforts to address the steady emigration of health workers from the country.
Professor Saad Ahmed, who is the Chief Medical Director at the Federal Medical Centre, Abuja, explained that one of the strategies to stem the brain drain in the health sector was to increase the production of the needed manpower, adding that funds had been allocated to 18 medical schools across the country for that purpose..
He further explained that the funds were meant to provide infrastructure and equipment with special focus on medicine, dentistry, nursing sciences, and pharmacy, assuring that a separate fund would soon be made available for hostel accommodation.
The TETFUND team also had the Director of Physical Infrastructure Department, Mr Y.M. Ashuru, and the Deputy Director, Dr. Yusuf Gamawa.
They were accompanied on the visit by top management staff of the Bayelsa Medical University (BMU), including the Vice Chancellor, Professor Dimie Ogoina.
