VICE-Chancellor of the University of Medical Sciences (UNIMED), Ondo, Professor Adesegun Fatusi, has said in the face of increasing needs for medical rehabilitation, there is a shortfall in medical rehabilitation experts and quality rehabilitative services in the country and the sub-Saharan Africa.
Fatusi who stated this during the inauguration of the Faculty of Medical Rehabilitation of the university, said despite the contribution of medical rehabilitation to health and well-being, there was a dearth of personnel in the field, hence the creation of the programme.
According to him, “medical rehabilitation is an important health field with unique contribution to health and wellbeing, and embraces the disciplines that focus on both basic and applied aspects of health sciences, services, education, social and engineering as they relate to restoring human functional capacity and improving a person’s interaction with the surrounding environment.
“The need for experts across the various disciplines of medical rehabilitation- physiotherapy, occupational therapy, audiology, speech pathology, prosthetics and orthotics has continued to increase globally and all available evidence indicate that the need will grow significantly in the coming years given the increase in the incidence of non- communicable diseases, increased life expectancy and other factors”
He noted that the nation’s higher educational system had shown poor inclination towards addressing the situation, saying less than a dozen universities offered any form of medical rehabilitation courses.
“Less than 15 universities are running such a course. Worst still, there is even no benchmark minimum academic standard for undergraduate training currently for important medical rehabilitation fields such as Occupational therapy, audiology and speech therapy”
In her remarks, the Registrar/Chief Executive Officer, the Medical Rehabilitation Therapists Board of Nigeria, Dr Akanle Olufunke, decried the shortage of medical rehabilitation professionals in the country, calling on universities and colleges of medicine across the country to consider the training of physiotherapy and medical rehabilitation professionals.
“Considering the increasing population of our country running to 200 million, fewer than 6,000 registered medical rehabilitation professionals cannot meet the increasing rehabilitation needs of our nation,” she said.
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