FMC Asaba Move For Accreditation Of Five Departments
The Federal Medical Centre (FMC), Asaba, located in the capital city of Delta State has moved for the approval of five departments of the hospital for a more productive service delivery to patients even as the hospital has incorporated into its scheme internship training for doctors, pharmacists, radiographers, medical laboratory scientists as well internship training for physiotherapists otherwise known as medical rehabilitation experts.
The Ag Medical Director (MD) Dr. Victor Osiatuma gave the highlight Thursday at a media chat with journalists in Asaba, where he reiterated that the five areas the hospital would do internship training compulsorily for doctors for one year after medical school and are allowed to practice under supervision.
Dr. Osiatuma said the hospital has been affiliated with the Post College Medical Training of Nigeria, West African College of Surgeons and Physicians to do post graduate training in “internal medicine, family medicine, gynaecology, podiatrist and general surgery, so in those five key areas, we have started post graduate training. That means we don’t employ medical officers any more, we employ you to come into the residency training programme that qualifies you to get a fellowship in either of the colleges, that enables you to be appointed as a consultant anywhere in the country or the West Africa Sub-region”.
He reiterated that doctors who are trained for six years and are able to pass the programme are appointed as a consultant, “in the course of this year, we started also putting plans together to accredit departments like public health, Anastasia and even radiology. That is the next projection we are having for next year and beyond”.
He said the accreditation was geared towards improving the quality of healthcare service delivery rendered to the public as the hospital is a tertiary health care institution, saying since government took over it and it became a federal medical centre, they have had course to handle a lot of secondary healthcare cases, “because the general hospital around here for one reason or the other have not been able to meet up”.
The Ag MD lamented that instead of focusing on tertiary healthcare delivery service which is a research base centre and where renal failure, cancer and other cases that are beyond malaria, typhoid and other minor sicknesses are treated, the place now has influx of all kinds of patients coming in for treatment, “as a tertiary institution, we shouldn’t be saddled with malaria, typhoid and normal delivery cases but when you have complication cases in delivery, sometimes obstructed labour, children with defects you send them here, that is when our jobs start”, he explained.
According to him, the tertiary institutions are where such cases are corrected, stressing that the tertiary institutions are set up to offer tertiary health care, do training of all manners of healthcare officers, revealing that in the nearest future the institution would also have school of nursing where specialty training would be giving to nurses just as he expressed hope that FMC Asaba, would soon become a Teaching Hospital where a university would be attached to it, “we are already discussing with one of the private universities, they have not been able to meet up with the requirements but when they do meet up with the requirements, we can become a federal teaching hospital”, said he.
He disclosed that the hospital now house Accident and Emergency where over 50 to 100 accident victims could be admitted with two separate emergency wards attached to them, it also has the children emergency ward where all manners of emergency cases in children are taken care of such as congenital anomalies and children who are born but start turning blue because of heart defects, has treating people with tight oesophagus, setting up its dialectic machine, renal dialysis unit with five dialysis machine which he said would kick off fully in January 2016.
He said the institution in the years ahead would send more personnel for training, acquire CT Scanning machine, MRI, bemoaning that strikes have rather been a setback to the overall development of the hospital over rivalry between one professional group or the other within the hospital, “the government is addressing them and we believe and we are very positive that they will address these issues quickly so that we can quickly put the issue of strike behind us. We would have gone far beyond this if not for strike, last year almost six months we were on strike”.