Yolamchi Ukaga, Aba
Governor Okezie Ikpeazu of Abia state, has announced plans by his administration to start a new hospital management model that would involve community participation in healthcare management.
The new plan, according to Ikpeazu, would give all health care professionals, especially pharmacists, their proper place in the healthcare management system.
Ikpeazu made this known when he received a delegation of the Pharmaceutical Society of Nigeria, PSN, led by Mazi Sam Ohuabunwa, its national president, on courtesy call at the Governor’s Lodge, Aba.
According to the governor, under the new arrangement, doctors and other hospital professionals will be recruited from the communities where the hospitals are located, pointing out that the newly-completed Nkporo hospital in Ohafia local government area, would be used as a case study in the new system.
He stated that government would make available monthly subvention to the new hospitals to subsidise child birth, malaria, high blood pressure treatments, amongst others.
He regretted that general hospitals in the state were not living up to expectations, both in revenue generation and service delivery to the people.
The governor, who attributed the rise in kidney diseases to drug abuse, made a case for the deployment of pharmaceutical services in Nigerian hospitals.
He congratulated Mazi Sam Ohuabunwa for the great job he had been doing through the Pharmaceutical Society of Nigeria and promised to leverage the services of pharmacists to improve the health sector of the state.
He assured the delegation that he would allocate of a piece of land for the society to build her secretariat as requested.
Ohuabunwa explained that they were in Abia to felicitate with the governor on the successes recorded by his administration and told him that some government-owned hospitals in the state were offering pharmaceutical services without pharmacists, calling for the employment of pharmacists in hospitals.
While informing the governor that the federal government had recently approved the consultant cadre for pharmacists and allocation of land for building of a secretariat for the society in Abia state.
The PSN president acknowledged the efforts of the Ikpeazu administration in the introduction of pharmacy as a course of study at the Abia State University and congratulated him for providing good leadership in the state, especially in the area of infrastructural development and also thanked him for his support for his emergence as the president of PSN.