Nigeria’s president, Muhammadu Buhari has given an insight on how citizens in the country can cut down on having to travel overseas to seek medical treatments.
According to him, the approach to that would be revamping Nigeria’s health sector and paying attention to health care services in all parts of the country, notwithstanding the area.
President Buhari gave the explanation during the commissioning of the Nigerian Air Force Reference Hospital in his home town, Duara, Katsina state.
He stressed that his administration will focus more on improving health facilities across the country, while revealing that the allocation for health sector rose to N340 billion in 2018, as against the N259 billion invested in 2015.
He iterated, “We must now redouble efforts to focus on providing more efficient funding of the health sector, improve sanitation and hygiene, and increase access to medicare in the rural areas in order to save lives of millions of Nigerians.
“There is, therefore, no more auspicious time to commission this Reference Hospital than now,’’ he said. In his remarks, Chief of Air Staff, Abubakar, said the 60-bed capacity hospital had a total of nine medical consultants, as well as 61 general medical practitioners and dentists.
“These developments have significantly enhanced the capacity of the medical services branch to provide quality healthcare to our personnel.”
The statement which was released by Mallam Garba Shehu, Buhari’s Special Assistant, also read, “Accordingly, significant strides have been made on life expectancy that would reduce some of the killer diseases associated with child and maternal mortality to less than 70 deaths per 100,000 live births by the year 2030, as planned in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, SDGs.
“Despite this, more efforts are needed to fully eradicate a wide range of diseases and many persistent and emerging health issues in our society.”
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