The newly installed President of the National Postgraduate Medical College, Lagos, Dr. Musa Muhammed Borodo, has said that his team will make national health research a priority.
According to him, this is an all important tool for national health development and if well harnessed, it will provide profound solutions to unending poor and embarrassing national health indices among comity of nations.
He stated this during his investiture held in the college, recently, saying, “Thus, in consultation with the Federal Ministry of Health, the college has agreed to a programme of determining our National research priorities that would allow our various facilities in our colleges to encourage their residents to pick research topics from that list for their mandatory dissertation work before qualifying as fellows.
“We have no doubt that the results of such works would impact positively on national health decision making for accelerated National health research development.
“We hope Tertiary Education Trust fund would consider these priority National health research area worthy of attracting their funds.”
Listing other areas of focus, the President said the college would vigorously pursue linkage programmes with sister international colleges and reputable medical institutions in both the North as well as the South in areas of particular interest to clinical practice as a nation.
“This is important in order to further expose our senior residents as well as our younger fellows to practice elsewhere, and to allow others to see our unique clinical terrain,” he said.
Borodo also said that the college would pursue additional training of its fellows to acquire further proficiency as trainers in emergency lifesaving skill acquisition.
”The need for these skills is ever increasing in our clinical practices sequel to increasing recklessness in driving, often under influence of drugs, increasing sectarian crises as well as other life threatening emergencies from non-communicable diseases,” he said.
The President however said with the additional responsibilities on the College in running its programmes of training at zonal level and the responsibility of nationwide supervision and regulation of all residency training in the country , there was the urgent need to expand the staffing of the college.
“The Government has in principle recognized this need and has given some approval in this direction, a lot would have to be done to get financial backing to allow for staff recruitment,” he said.
Earlier in his speech, Minister of State for Health, Dr. Olorunimbe Mamora, commended the college for living up to expectation of producing fellows who could compete with other health practitioners in the world.
“The caliber of health practitioners turned out from here are responsible for the various quality services in our health sector,” he said.
Congratulating the president, the minister urged him to bring to bear his age long administrative skills in order to run the college smoothly.
