THE Presidency has said that the State House Clinic was not designed to accommodate “unentitled” people, noting that it would have to scale down the number of persons that should have access to medical attention at the clinic.
According to the Presidency, the clinic was originally established to cater for the healthcare needs of only the President, Vice President, their families and staff working in the Presidential Villa.
It said, over the recent years, services rendered to a “privileged few” had suffered a noticeable decline, and that the management must correct the situation.
The Permanent Secretary in the State House, Tijani Umar, who disclosed this at the two-day Service Improvement Plan Workshop in Abuja, said the authorities had resolved to focus on only those officially entitled to health care at the facility.
“We are going to trim down the number of unentitled people. Unentitled people are bringing constraints to us,” he said.
The Permanent Secretary added, “This will assist us to look at those areas requiring improvement. The biggest room in the world is room for improvement. The Clinic used to be a yardstick for performance measurement in the medical enclave 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 a noticeable decline to almost zero service delivery. This resulted in a mockery of the facility and loss of confidence by its customers on its ability to render effective service.”
He added, “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 is convened, involving all relevant stakeholders.”
