Shortage of medical personnel, frequent power outage and lean budgetary provisions have hit the State House Clinic.
The challenges have seriously affected the waiting time by patients and delivery of service at the nation’s seat of power clinic, according to Servicom National Coordinator, Mrs Nnenna Akajemeli.
Specifically, inadequate doctors and
incessant power failure have affected the performance of some sensitive machines at the clinic.
Akajemeli said the equipment required constant power supply to function maximally.
She spoke on Thursday at a two-day workshop on service improvement in the hospital.
Also speaking, the Permanent Secretary, State House, Tijjani Umar, noted that lean budgetary allocation had forced the State House Clinic to scale down the number of persons authorised to access medical attention at the facility.
The clinic was specifically established to provide health care services to the President and Vice-President, members of their families as well as members of staff working in the Presidential Villa.
Currently, the facility caters for about 32,000 patients which the authorities said “is not sustainable.”
Umar said “hangers-on” would be eliminated while services will only be extended to those who are officially entitled to access the facility.
According to him, a renewed zeal to enforce this became necessary after a meeting of stakeholders to bring back the clinic to its original status of efficient service to those who are entitled to it.
“We are going to trim down the number of unentitled people. Unentitled bringing constraints to us, bringing issues, that’s all. If you have give children in your house neighbours send like 20 every evening to come, your pot will not be enough. That is what we are saying.
“This will assist us to look at those areas requiring improvement,” adding that “the biggest room in the world is the room for improvement.
“First and foremost, we are talking about service provision. Service provision cuts across all facets of services. Services by human beings, meaning doctors, other medical staff, services through the provision of equipment and facilities.
“We are going to do everything we can to ensure that we stay up fine and in top shape serving our patients. So, it’s like an across the board kind of improvement that I am talking about.
“It simply means that the lean resources of today might not allow us to achieve our aim. Only through that, and therefore we need partnerships, we need relationships,” Umar said.
The Permanent Secretary said the clinic used to be a yardstick for performance measurement in the medical circles
and pride of the highly trained and experienced personnel working there.
“However, over the recent years, it was observed that services rendered at the clinic to the privileged few, suffered noticeable decline to almost zero service delivery. This resulted to a mockery of the facility and loss of confidence by its customers on its ability to render effective service.
“In an effort to upturn this ugly trend and revive its past glory, the State House
Management reversed the Medical Centre profile granted the facility, to its original status of clinic in order to limit the number of patients it handles and also maintain the original purpose it was created for.
“As you are all aware, in order to further improve service delivery in the Clinic, an outpatient survey was conducted in October 2019, by the SERVICOM National Office and the State House SERVICOM unit.
“A Report on that regard had since been forwarded to me and in order to review the findings of the survey, as well as propose an action plan indicating short, medium and long term actions to improve service delivery at the clinic, I
approved that this session be convened, involving all relevant stakeholders, and cut across all departments of the clinic, with active involvement of the SERVICOM Unit to promote service improvement in the clinic ” he said.
Umar promised that the power outage which had been a major challenge to effective service at the hospital would be addressed.
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