Public health financing abysmally low, says CMD

‘Govt spends N4,500 per patient yearly’


The Federal Government spends N4,500 on a patient yearly, a medical practitioner has said.
The Chief Medical Director (CMD), Lagos University Teaching Hospital (LUTH), Idia Araba, Prof Akin Osibogun, made this known at a workshop by the hospital for health reporters in Lagos.

Comparing health financing in the United States to Nigeria’s, he said public expenditure per head on health care in the US is $7,681 while that of Nigeria is below $30. "Nigeria’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per head is $1,000 while in the US it is $22,000."

He said the yardsticks for measuring health care are indices of health outcome such as infant rates, death of under-five and maternal deaths.

He said patients should pay for treatment, because health care is expensive, and the government cannot do it alone.

On the saying that prevention is better than cure, he argued: "Preventive medicine should be embraced as curative medicine is expensive and unattainable by the poor especially."

According to him, the quality of health care that people want is capital intensive and the government cannot do it alone. "Whenever you match quality against equity, quality must suffer."

To achieve the best practices, he noted that technology is needed in health care, but "it is quite expensive, as it has to be managed and in some cases replaced."

Osibogun said: "Health is not merely the absence of diseases, but a complete state of physical and mental well-being. This requires a lot of things."

He said whereas private hospitals can charge a fee of N1million to enable to replace the equipment they use, adding that government hospitals can’t charge that high amount and may not be able to replace the items used.

He said technology advances the ability of experts to conduct diagnosis and detect diseases. This, he said, brings to the fore some of the challenges in defining health.

He said health is viewed from five Ds – death, diseases, disability, discomfort and dissatisfaction.

Osibogun said technology must be funded as it had economic implication to it. "An x-ray can perform limited functions, but a CT scan can do more while a Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) can pick more information than the CT scan," he added.

He said further that defining disease is not also easy as economy and technology deployed have roles to play. "For example, on breast cancer some of the lumps can be benign, others may be malignant. You can diagnose with immunograph or biopsy. Technology can help make better diagnosis but it is expensive," he said.


http://www.thenationonlineng.net/2011/index.php/health/38796-public-health-financing-abysmally-low-says-cmd.html