In response to the downturn in the economy, the national oil conglomerate, Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), has announced plans to commercialise its 52 clinics located in different parts of the country. The organisation’s Managing Director, Dr. Maikanti Baru, confirmed the development.
Elaborating on the plan, Dr. Babatunde Adeniran, Chief Operating Officer (COO), Ventures of the NNPC, said the ultimate goal is to provide top grade medical services for the people. To achieve this, the plan will be executed in three phases. The first phase will involve an upgrade of the 52 NNPC clinics and hospitals, while the second phase will target some of its major hospitals. This phase will see the designation of AIDC as a “medical mall, warehousing top class health providers in cardiovascular, oncology, renal dialysis, radiology and laboratory services.” The plan also aims to make the AIDC a hub for other clinics in the conglomerate through what Adeniran described as “telemedicine”.
The third phase, which the COO called “newbusiness”, is the stage at which state-of-the-art hospitals and diagnostic centres will be constructed on presently unutilised NNPC lands in places like Kaduna, Mosimi and Port Harcourt, to deliver world class health facilities that can compete with the best of its kind in the world.
These are lofty ideas, no doubt. The dearth of good health facilities in the country is legendary. Consequently, the foreign exchange lost by the country to medical tourism is better imagined. These are the two problems that the NNPC authorities want to address with this commercialisation plan.
The organisation has in focus the good model of the Arabian-American Oil Company (Aramco) of Saudi Arabia, which today is reportedly the biggest and most profitable oil corporation in the world.
Aramco has partnered, over the decades, with the world renowned John Hopkins University in the USA to deliver cutting edge healthcare facilities and services to its staff and country of operation. This successful model has been replicated in the oil-rich Arabian countries of UAE and Kuwait.
The commercialisation project, the NNPC authorities say, is to make the health facilities more useful to its staff, open them up to the public and ultimately, make money for the corporation. We can hardly fault this plan. It reflects the mood of the nation and is based on a template that has worked well in other climes.
Our plea, however, is that the medical needs of NNPC staff should be kept in focus. The zeal to offer health services to members of the public and to make money for the corporation should not detract from the responsibility of providing adequate medical services for NNPC workers and their families. The money generating objective of the initiative should also not be allowed to impair the quality of the services to be offered.
When the clinics are upgraded and made open to the public, we expect that their services will improve remarkably. The existing personnel who will operate the upgraded and new facilities should be adequately trained and top specialists in the identified fields of medicine recruited to offer world class services.
A few weeks ago, the South-East branch of the National Association of Resident Doctors lamented the dearth of healthcare facilities in the zone, with the result that people in the zone travel long distances at huge costs to access certain medical services. It is interventions like this one by the NNPC that we can use to improve access to quality healthcare in the country.
We call on the NNPC authorities to scrupulously follow their laid out plans and ensure that they deliver to their staff and the nation at large, the world class facilities they have promised.