Economy
A Pharmacist, Peter Mannah, on Tuesday underscored the need for private sector support to boost the continent’s efforts in development of its healthcare sector.
Mannah, the Founder/CEO of Health for All Medicals, in Sierra Leone gave the advice in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Abuja.
He said: ”A situation whereby people indulged in medical tourism, rather than make healthcare services in their countries functional, often hindered growth in the sector.”
According to him, there is the need for private sector operators to work closely with the government in the provision of healthcare services, to achieve targets.
Mannah said: “I am trying to preach how the private sector, particularly in Sierra Leone, could support various governments in ensuring that quality healthcare services are offered.
“This is because the government and the people are losing lots of foreign currencies, in terms of people traveling abroad for medical treatment.
“What we look at is a model called community investment scheme; such will allow the private sector to collaborate with government health institutions, particularly hospitals, and ensure equipment needed are provided.
“At the end of the day, the money used to buy those products are actually recovered, so we are not only looking at offering medical services, but also capacitating our own healthcare professionals.
“If we engage in a community investments scheme, it will allow us to bring in foreign experts who can in turn leave behind those expertise, and share expertise with our own doctors and other medical professionals.”
He added that such support could help to increase the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of all countries in the continent, medical professionalism, and healthcare services.
Mannah said: ”People will not need to travel abroad again for greener pastures as usual.
”It will encourage people to stay and contribute towards provision of quality healthcare services, not just in Sierra Leone, but also across Africa.
“Let private sector operators see investing in healthcare services as an opportunity to advance various countries’ growth through a shared community investment scheme that will unfold in future.”
This, he added, would enable banks or other companies to come together to support provision of medical equipment and have a model that could ensure those costs of equipment are regrouped.
Mannah said: “At the end of the day, medical equipment will be in service. We will also ensure that we bring foreign professionals who can serve our nation and our continent as a whole.
“The foundation has to be laid now, if we complete our establishment, we will bring foreign experts, so those experts will influence compatriots to come home and offer health services we need.
“We want to have a one-stop facility that could ensure we increase medical tourism to West Africa instead of taking it out of West Africa.”
“So, we have to collaborate with other facilities out there and this is a project we are looking at supporting governments and the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals agenda.”
According to Mannah, a large number of patients often moved abroad to countries like India, and other places for medical treatments, saying it resulted in regional governments’ loss of funds.
“We also go into hospitals and look at those who genuinely could not afford their medications, we provide them medications and we do it in collaboration with governments.
“If we go into a hospital and ask particular government hospital managements who in turn, give us prescriptions for those who could not afford bills and ensure we provide for them.
“We have assisted more than 10,000 people since we started, we did 60 free surgeries in December, 2022 and did about 30 hernia repair, 25 hydrosis and then five appendicitis,” he said.
He decried the fact that people died as a result of conditions that could be treated, but lacked funds to tackle medical challenges to pose concern.
According to him, such people cannot even afford medicare in communities where there are no hospitals and they do not have to talk about other amenities.
“So, we will go into such communities and provide them treatment; before we went to one of such communities one of the patients had died because there were complications, as we were told by the medical personnel,” he said.
NAN reports that Health for all Medicals is a pharmaceutical, diagnostics and medical facility based in Sierra Leone, and hoping to spread to Nigeria and other parts of Africa.(NAN)
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Tags: Founder/CEO of Health for All Medicals Peter Mannah Sierra Leone
