Nigeria: IVF, open heart surgery our priorities -LUTH CMD

Nigerian Tribune:
Part of the missions and objectives of LUTH is to provide quality health services using highly skilled manpower and deploying technology to ensure safety of patients and ensuring quality of services. In this interview by Sade Oguntola, the hospital says that in line with the FG’s transformation agenda, it had commenced care in various disciples of medicine such as Invitro Fertilisation, IVF.
What activities is the hospital undertaking to achieve its goals of training, research and treatment? THE Lagos University Teaching Hospital (LUTH), Idi Araba has a triple mandate; service, human capital development for health care services and to conduct research. Different cadres of health care providers are provided as well as different services in all sub specialities of medicine as well as research in different aspects of health. And of course the hospital has come a long way since its establishment in 1962.
Just last year the hospital was 50 years old and we were able to celebrate it, looking at what the hospital has been able to do in those years.
The hospital started with less than 300 beds and today the hospital has more than 800 beds, making the hospital one of the biggest in Nigeria. When the hospital first started, we did not provide antenatal care services, that was way back in 1962, but as of today, we do not only provide antenatal care services, we have a labour ward theatre where we perform all kinds of super-specialised gynaecological and obstetric services and we are commencing our In Vitro Fertilisation (IVF) programme again.
The first IVF baby was produced in this hospital by the duo of Professor Giwa Osagie and Professor Dapo Ashiru around 1984 to 1987. Then everything went quiet since that time. But with the support of the Federal Government, we are restarting that programme so that we can put smiles on the faces of people with challenges of having babies.
How pocket friendly is it going to be? It will be reasonable because it is supported by the government and in any case, it is going to be in-country. So definitely, it will be cheaper than going for it abroad. The equipment for this have already started arriving. We are training our staff now, we are commencing all sort of programmes. Professor Giwa Osagie is also going to be helping us.
Is this a way of bringing back the hospital’s past glory? LUTH has remained the glorious and leading hospital in the country. But what we are trying to do is to keep on raising the standard. LUTH remains and has always remained one of the leading hospitals in the country.
Let’s delve more into activities and services LUTH offers? We cover a broad area of medicine. Of course there are different sub-speciality of medicine and laboratory medicine. We have capability of diagnosis in our laboratory medicine. We have a fully automated haematology, clinical pathology and histology laboratories. Of course, we have introduced new equipment into our medical laboratory.
In our radio diagnosing department, we have CT scanner, MRI and digital X-ray equipment, all functional. Shortly, the hospital is acquiring the latest 128 slides CT machine. It will be the first in the country.
Is this under a Public-Private–Partnership arrangement? Yes, it is. We have linked the laboratory medicine with radio-diagnosis to boost our capability to make proper diagnosis and to do so promptly. It also ensures quality result. With prompt diagnosis, treatment is half way through.
In addition, with the assistance of the Federal government, we have also been acquiring sophisticated equipment. For instance, the hospital can boast of laparoscopic towers that can help us to do minimally invasive surgery. We also have equipment to carry out total hip replacement
Have you started the hips replacement surgery? We have done them in the past and we are restarting them and the equipment are on ground. So we can start any minute from now. We have the manpower to do this surgery.
What other services are offered? Our Guinness Eye Centre remains one of the best eye centres in the country and as a mark of corporate social responsibility, every year; we perform up to a 100 of free cataract surgery for members of the public. We are, perhaps, the first hospital to deploy the technology of small incision cataract removal in the country. We have trained people for other centres in the country and the technique is now commonly used in the country now.