Doris Obinna
the Managing Director, VCare Diagnostic, Mr. Sanjay Mathur have decried the current trend where about 40 – 50 per cent of the samples are sent outside of Nigeria for testing which increase the Turn Around Time (TAT) thereby leading to delay in treatment an increase in prevalence of diseases in the country.
According to him, there would be no need for samples to leave the country as the vision of VCare is to fill key gaps that currently persist in the healthcare diagnostic space in Nigeria.
“The state-of-the-art laboratory is established to provide 100 per cent testing as well as quality reports in the least TAT that will enable doctors improve patients treatment time.”
He said: “These samples that leave Nigeria is one of the problems currently affecting the healthcare diagnostic space, noting that this causes delay of test results, thereby limiting the doctor’s ability to treat patients.
“Some of the results which are needed for diagnosis of patients get delayed because the TAT of results, which comes from any of the countries take about 10 and sometimes 30 days for some of the tests report to come out.”
Having diagnostic facilities in Nigeria, which performs about 95 per cent of the tests will enhance early treatment of diseases, as well as increase the country’s ability to become a reference laboratory point for Africa.
“The diagnostic facility, in collaboration with India biggest laboratory, Techmed will ensure the equipment required for the diagnostic testing are available in Nigeria to test about 600 samples per hour.
“We are going to become like a research and reference lab for the entire healthcare industry, so that our customers are not only direct customers, but also other laboratories, hospital, research institutions, Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) – they all will be sending samples to us and we do the tests for them.”
“Apart from the procedures in the quality of equipment we should have, we cannot talk about quality assurance with cheap inferior equipment.
“Quality assurance comes from everything, right from materials, reagents, quality of equipment, manpower, and also the systems and procedures you follow.”
He noted however, that as part of efforts to ensure quality assurance and optimum diagnostic result for every Nigerian, the home collection model is adopted, where laboratory technicians and riders go to people’s home to get the samples and then results are sent via online or hardcopy to the patients home without any charges.
On his part, the Quality Assurance Manager, Abiola Adejumobi said lack of quality assurance has led to inaccurate diagnosis, which has questioned the reliability of laboratory results in Nigeria.
According to him, one of the ways to address the problem is by having internal quality control materials of known standards, as well as external quality assurance programme and ensuring efficiency in both the technical and human capacity.
“It will be our endeavour to earn the reputation of having the fastest TAT and being the most trustworthy and reliable pathology in Nigeria,” he added.