By Zayamu Hassan
The Guild of Private Medical Laboratory Directors (GMLD) in Nigeria has called on the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), to include private medical laboratories in the selection of healthcare facilities by enrollees of the scheme.
The National President of GMLD, Prince Adibo Elochukwmade the call at the 23rd National Conference and Annual General Meeting of the Guild on Wednesday in Abuja.
He said in the face of the critical role of laboratory services in modern health care, it is still saddening and worrisome that the involvement of the laboratories in private sector into the NHIS scheme is non existent.
“Therefore, we strongly advocate that NHIS among the other interventions, should urgently address the issues of direct selection to laboratories by enrollees as currently being done in COVID-19 private laboratories network, of low capacity utilization of secondary health care providers such as stand-alone medical laboratory service.
“If this is done, all registered and accredited health care providers laboratories and facilities will be integrated in the scheme as well helped us scale up quality coverage of more Nigerians.
While advocating for support for the private medical laboratories, Elochukwu said: “Consequent upon this, it is hope and prayer that the lessons learnt will further turn the search light of government and international/local support organisations to the private sector who hitherto have been grossly excluded in inclusive policies, infrastructure improvement, support funding allocation as well as research grants.”
According to him, the exclusion which informs our choice of their conference theme, is regrettable and unfortunate as it leaves the country missing out of rich medical data domicile in this sector which ought to be used for health sector improvement.
“For us in the GMLD, we see a huge opportunity if resources from private and government sector are harnessed to improve Nigeria’s healthcare services, especially, in the area of human vaccines production and manufacture in-vitro diagnostics.”
“In addition, the commitment of federal government of Nigeria to Universal Health Coverage (UHC) is very welcomed, especially the key objectives to reduce out- of –pocket expenditure for citizens through the reforms in the NHIS,” Elochukwu added.
