‘Cost recovery policy makes hospitals patient unfriendly’

06.04.2008

FORMER Vice Chancellor of University of Ibadan, Professor Ayodele Falase has said that the Federal Government’s cost recovery policy that emphasises payment before service has continued to make the nation’s hospitals patient unfriendly, despite government’s huge investment to revamp and reequip them.

Professor Falase speaking at this year’s swearing-in ceremony of new doctors into the medical profession at the University of Ilorin said, though these hospitals have partially regained their previous status as beacons of medical care in the country, “the problems arising from the implementation of the cost recovery policy of government is one sore point for patients.

The fact that patients do not get a satisfactory service even after they had paid for them is another.” According to the medical expert, things have not fared better in the general hospitals and primary health care centers dotted across the country either.

He stressed that “many of the staff of our hospitals are impolite and sometimes rude, may be because of the daily frustrations they face in the setting of a heavy patient-load or it is just part of their own personalities. Whatever it is, a great deal of orientation of all the staff of our hospitals is urgently required.”