Tell us your experiences working in
Nigeria?
There is a gap between the
technology and the physician working
here. If I wanted to be brutally honest,
I would say Nigeria as a whole is still
practising 1970s to 1980s medicine
that was practised in the US then. That
needs to change now and quickly.
Which can be changed with
technologies that exist now. There is a
technology boom in computers and
healthcare. Somewhere in between
that technology boom, Nigeria got
lost. A lot of times, people believe
buying CAT scans and these big
equipment is the way to go but if you
don’t have a system in place to
sustain that equipment, it falls by the
wayside and becomes null and void.
There is a medical technology gap and
if we can bridge that gap, we would
be on the road to better health care.
What do you think could improve
what we have here?
The basic thing here is technology. I
must say that the physicians here in
Nigeria are better. The Nigerian
medical team-nurses, doctors-are
brilliant, and from a clinical
standpoint, Nigerians are the best. But
medicine isn’t just based on clinical.
You have to have some of the
technology along with the clinical side
to it. In some of the physicians we
bring from the US, their clinical skills
are still low, because the technology
is so high. If we can get the
technology, Africa could be the next
goldmine for healthcare, because the
physicians in Africa are so brilliant.
When I talk of technology, it is the full
arena. The physician and nurse have
to be trained on the equipment. And
then there is another side, the
biomedical side. A hospital is only as
good as their biomedical department.


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