Oyo State Commissioner of Health, Dr Azeez Adeduntan has said that all private health facilities will soon be required to freshly register as part of the state government’s drive to curtail medical quackery and preventable deaths.
Dr Adeduntan had led Oyo State Task Force on Private Health Facilities to inspect six private health facilities in Eruwa and Lanlate as well as two-state owned government hospitals, General Hospital, Eruwa and General Hospital, Lanlate, as part of his ministry’s effort to sanitise healthcare delivery in the state.
Five of the health facilities were sealed for offences which included having no current certificate of registration, inappropriate staffing and inadequate staffing among others.
The Commissioner of Health said the ministry was resolved to sanitised the private health care delivery in the state and run out quacks, adding that doctors who are registering or covering for private hospitals are also being monitored.
Dr Adeduntan who assured that closure of the health facilities taskforce activities were not punitive, but for corrective purposes, said all health facilities sanctioned by the taskforce in the past were being monitored to ensure they comply with expected requirements to practise.
The monitoring of private hospitals, which he said was a continuous one, he assured was not about payment of registration fees, adding, “payment alone is not the requirement to register a health facility. We are talking about ensuring standards that are within the purview of medicine that people have to follow.”
According to him, “they are killing our people; the standard of care is abysmal. We have places where there is only community health workers pretending to be nurses, laboratory scientists not licensed to work in a medical laboratory and so on.
“And this is why we want to make sure we clean the system so that people can live and get treatment that is the best. No government will keep his hands crossed and say people should continually be killed.”
Dr Adeduntan, who declared that by 2018, Oyo State healthcare delivery will be one of the best in the country, assured that “Oyo state will not be a hiding place for quacks.”