The Lagos Chapter of the Association of General and Private Medical Practitioners has called for the streamlining of referral system in Nigeria’s health sector.
Its Chairman, Dr Adeyeye Arigbabuwo, made the call in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Lagos on Monday.
He said that a well-structured referral system would discourage the treatment of minor ailments at the nation’s teaching hospitals.
Arigbabuwo said that primary health facilities should handle cases such as malaria infections.
“Situation where a malaria patient just walks straight into a teaching hospital for treatment and the person is welcomed is not ideal.
“You over saddled the teaching hospitals with things that are just mundane and cases that could have been taken care of at the primary health facilities.
“When I say mundane, it means something that the primary healthcare facilities can take care of.
“Our issues of accessibility and availability and sustainability, they are all factors of the division of labour in the three tiers of government and therefore primary, secondary, tertiary, as they are, they are now not much mutually exclusive and people should begin to understand that; but we can do better.”
The chairman stressed the need to tackle the challenges facing the primary healthcare centres which include lack of health workers at the grassroots.
“At the primary health facility level, the structure may be there, but the personnel may not be there.
“And sometimes, you see the structure dilapidated and personnel may be there, but what will be their level of qualification and their competences to handle the system.
“Are we saying we have more than enough health centres, for example, on ground in the country?
“I do not want people to think so.”
Arigbabuwo said that only mass distribution of human resources among the primary health facilities would enable these centres to perform their ascribed roles in healthcare delivery.
He gave the figure of doctors registered under the Medical and Dental Council of Nigeria as 40,000, adding that the number was inadequate to serve an estimated 170 million Nigerians.
“You now look at the primary care level where the pyramid is just widest and we begin to see the population that we need to take care of, is large.
“It means that we need to concentrate on that primary level; if we concentrate the better we are; and our task at the secondary level of health care and tertiary level will be much lesser”.