FG Advised To Adopt Best Practices For Equity In Health Sector

FG Advised To Adopt Best Practices For Equity In Health Sector.

The Association of Community Pharmacists of Nigeria (ACPN) called on the federal government to adopt global best practices and institute comprehensive reforms that promote professionalism, transparency, and equity in health leadership

It also challenged what it described as the long-standing dominance of physicians in healthcare administration and calling for holistic reforms to restore efficiency and fairness in Nigeria’s health sector.

This was in reaction to the recent statement by the Nigerian Association of Resident Doctors (NARD), leadership of hospitals by physicians produces better patient outcomes” and that “physicians do not interfere in the affairs of other health professions.

In a statement signed and issued in Abuja by its National Chairman, Ambrose Ezeh, the Association rebutted these claims, calling them misleading and a distortion of healthcare realities in Nigeria.

It said, for Nigeria to escape the wilderness of healthcare failure, it must return to a system that recognises the value of all health professionals and stops the monopolisation of leadership by one group.

According to Ezeh, healthcare administration is an autonomous profession in itself and should not be the exclusive domain of physicians just as he traced the current situation to Decree 10 of 1985, enacted during the military regime of General Ibrahim Babangida and then Minister of Health, Prof. Olikoye Ransome-Kuti, which made the appointment of physicians as heads of Federal Health Institutions (FHIs) compulsory.

The ACPN reiterated its readiness for continued intellectual engagement but insisted that leadership in the health sector must be based on competence and professional relevance, not medical hierarchy.