Japa: LUTH Closes 5 Wards Over Manpower Shortage

Lagos University Teaching Hospital (LUTH) has shut down five wards due to the shortage of manpower, the House of Representatives Committee on Health, Lagos State, has disclosed.

The committee who disclosed this on Tuesday attributed the decline in the country’s health manpower to the relocation of doctors and nurses from the Lagos University Teaching Hospital (LUTH) to various parts of the world.

The committee’s chairman, Hon. Amos Magaji, said the situation is worrisome, while stating that the legislative branch is trying to stop the growing number of Nigerians traveling overseas for medical treatment.

“As a committee, we will work together with the federal government and also with the teaching hospital to find a way out of these national embarrassments that have befallen this country. It is not something that can be fixed in one day, but nevertheless, we are going to be approaching it piecemeal. We are going to do what we can do immediately and what we can do long-term.

“So, by the grace of God, some of the issues of the ‘japa’, we are actually looking at how to solve this problem, starting even from the enrollment in universities, and then how house officers are employed, and then of course, the residency programme,” he affirmed.

He said healthcare workers have sacrificed so much for Nigerians to be healthy, assuring that, “Our hands are on deck and then that was the reason why if you were here earlier, you discovered that some of the key questions and some of the key things we attended to here were things that have to do with delivering affordable and accessible health care to Nigerians.”

Meanwhile, the permanent secretary, Lagos State Primary Health Care Board (LSPHCB), Dr. Ibrahim Mustafa, has announced  the agency’s plann to recruit more healthcare professionals and rehabilitate more facilities to increase the health services access of citizens at primary healthcare centres.