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Enugu State Governor Peter Mbah has said the 300-bed Enugu International Hospital was established to reduce the number of Nigerians travelling abroad for medical treatment and retain the huge resources spent on healthcare outside the country.
Mbah said the facility was part of his administration’s deliberate plan to position Enugu as a medical tourism destination by providing world-class healthcare and attracting top medical professionals to the state.
The governor, who spoke after a pre-launch tour of the facility, said the hospital would contribute to his administration’s plan to build a £30 billion economy within its eight-year horizon.
According to him, the idea was conceived before his campaign for the governorship, following his understanding of the scale of Nigeria’s medical tourism market.
He said: “This is not a facility that is knee-jerk or that was accidentally put here. If you recall, during our campaign for office, we made it clear that we were committed to making Enugu a medical tourism hub on the continent.
“We knew the size of that market. We knew also that we wanted to have a good chunk of that market. So, what you’re seeing here today is a plan that had even been conceived before we started our campaign.
“And in our manifesto, if you go back to that manifesto and flip through the healthcare sector, you would also see there that we had conceived this much earlier than now to attract medical tourism.
“And we knew also that was never going to be wished into existence, that we needed to do concrete things. We needed to build a world-class facility and, most importantly, attract top-notch professionals who would come here and provide the service.”
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Mbah said the hospital’s facilities, combined with telemedicine, digital and electronic medical practice, would make it possible for Nigerians to access specialised medical opinions from experts abroad without having to travel out of the country.
He said, “We can actually attract or even receive those opinions abroad and yet the money and the manpower would still remain here.”
The governor also said the cost of treatment at the facility would be significantly lower than what Nigerians currently spend seeking top-quality healthcare in countries such as India, Turkey, the United States and the United Kingdom.
He said the hospital would also create numerous employment opportunities, noting that several Nigerian medical professionals practising abroad had already expressed interest in returning to work at the facility.
“We have received an outpouring of interest from people who were trained here at some point and later went overseas to practise. They are now happy to come back home and give back the gift that was nurtured here. They want to bring it back here. So, we were excited about that in terms of job creation.
“This is going to create quite a whole lot of jobs. And you also know that this is not, again, an accident. If you look at our intervention in the healthcare sector, it’s been quite deliberate, very intentional, from primary healthcare to secondary, tertiary and now maybe quaternary care.
“So, we have been very intentional about making sure that our people have access to quality healthcare. We’re quite big on security and healthcare because we know that’s what investors would ask you,” he stressed.
The Chief Executive Officer of the hospital, Prof. Sam Agwu, said the Enugu International Hospital would provide advanced medical care and attract specialists in cancer treatment, surgery, nuclear medicine, therapeutics, diagnostics and other specialised fields.
