Funmi Olaitan, Ibadan

Former Ondo State governor, Dr. Olusegun Mimiko, has charged  leaders in the country to develop the political will to stop people from travelling abroad for medical treatment.

Mimiko who spoke on Thursday at the 51st Annual General Meeting and Scientific Conference of the International College of Surgeons, Nigeria National Section, held at University College Hospital (UCH), Ibadan, said medical tourism is a clear message to the government at all levels that there is a need to develop every sector of the economy.

According to him, despite the fact that Nigeria had celebrated medical doctors all over the world, the infrastructure to turn around the image of medical practice in the country is lacking.

He said, “The message is to the government. We have cutting edge medical professionals scattered all around the world. But at home, we must have the necessary infrastructure, equipment, gadget and the technology before you can practice your act.

“If we build state of the art facilities and create the enabling environment, people will come to Nigeria for medical treatment because we have the personnel. Above all, we need the political will to do all these.”

Speaking on road crashes and trauma care in Nigeria, Mimiko said Nigeria lost a great percentage of its youth population to road accident which are preventable.

“The greatest killer of our young adults from age 15 to 29 in Nigeria is road traffic accident. The situation is getting worse and government at all levels must sit down to fashion out a comprehensive emergency medical service to be able to respond adequately to this public health epidemic.

“Essentially, there are important legs to road accident and number one is attitude of our people. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), most accidents are caused by bad behaviours like over-speeding, drunk driving, failure to use safety belt and so on. Our intervention as a nation must be preventive. It must aim at getting the right attitude.

“When I was Ondo State governor, we built state of the art motor parks with waiting rooms and we banned selling alcoholic beverages at the parks. The psychological environment of our motor parks is perhaps the number one trigger mechanism for many road accidents. In Ondo, we changed the ambience at the parks to drive home the important safety point”, he said.

The former governor stated further that it was important to design roads in such a way that it would have walkway for pedestrians, noting that there must be ambulance with advanced life saving gadget appropriately located around the country to save accident victims.

He said, “We must also have trained paramedics with advance equipment that we use in Ondo State that can turn apart any vehicle and rescue victims. The first hour after accident is golden and that is when we lose most victims because there is no system in place to attend to them immediately”.