The federal government has begun the upgrading of the Federal Medical Centre, Keffi in Nasarawa state to a teaching hospital.
The Minister of Health, Dr. Osage Ehanire, disclosed this Friday at the Senate during a public hearing on a bill seeking the establishment of a Federal University of Lafia Teaching Hospital.
“The Federal Ministry of Health is already working on a proposal on upgrading of federal medical centres to teaching hospitals, one of which is the one in Keffi, Nasarawa state,” he said.
Emphasising on the need for the teaching hospital while fielding questions from journalists on the sideline of the public hearing, Senator Tanko Al-Makura (APC, Nasarawa South), said the people of Lafia and its environs lived in danger without a teaching hospital in the town.
He lamented that it was not proper for people of Lafia to travel for 200 kilometres before they could access tertiary health centres, a situation which he said “is causing avoidable deaths of people in need of such health care services.”
“If you look at the location of Lafia in Nasarawa state, you will see that people within Lafia will travel up to 200 Kilometres before they can access a tertiary or a referral health service and that is not acceptable in the 21st century,” he said.
According to him, the tertiary health care institution is needed in the Lafia axis and Nasarawa state as a whole in view of the prevailing population explosion.
“If you look at the population explosion within the vicinity of Lafia at the moment, the population of Nasarawa state is about four to five million half of whom are the people from the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) that are resident in neighbouring towns.”
At the end of the hearing, the chairman of the Committee on Health, Ibrahim Yahaya Oloriegbe (APC, Kwara Central), told the various stakeholders that the aggregate of views expressed would be reflected in the final report that would be submitted to the Senate “soon.”
