Don urges FG to extend TETFund to teaching hospitals
A professor of Health Sciences, Prof. Michael Ogirima, has called on the Federal Government to extend funding from the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) for teaching hospitals. Ogirima who is the Provost,College of Health Sciences, Federal University Lokoja (FUL), Kogi, made the call while delivering the 32nd Inaugural Lecture of the University in Lokoja on Thursday.
The inaugural lecturer spoke on the lecture titled:” Improvising To Greatness: The Surgeon”s Sojourn.” He said that the call for including teaching hospitals is that they play a dual role as both tertiary health institutions and training centers for medical students from universities, which are already beneficiaries of TETFund. If this is not possible, special medical education trust fund should be put in place to take care of our poorly equipped health centres.”
According to him, there is need to enforce various existing policies on health insurance and social welfare schemes for the institutions and the vulnerable. Government is encouraged to establish more specialised universities as there is always competitive funding among various programmes in the university.
The medical programmes are expensive to run and the tendency for neglect and underfunding exist. It is recommended that the medical education of any university should have between 30 to 40 per cent of the annual capital budget of that institution, he added. Ogirima also called for more orthopaedic hospitals, Trauma Centres and rehabilitation services to be strategically established in various geopolitical zones along busy routes to cover most burdens of trauma in the country.
More philanthropists like Pa Afe Babalola, SAN, of Ado Ekiti, should be encouraged to set up private medical schools to shore up the quantity and qualities of medical and allied health professionals in the country, he said .
Earlier in his remarks, FUL’s Vice-Chancellor, Prof. Olayemi Akinwumi, said that in a nation where the health sector grapples with inadequate infrastructure, brain drain, and limited resources, the call to “improvise to greatness” could not have come at a better time than this.
Akinwumi said that the lecture serves as a wake-up call to policy makers to invest more deliberately in healthcare, research, and education. This is because a nation that neglects its surgeons, scientists, and scholars risks its very future, the V-C warned
