Medical Tourism: We Will Fight Brain Drain – NIPRD D-G
To help curb the increasing incidence of medical tourism, the Nigeria Institute of Pharmaceutical Research and Development (NIPRD) says it is making efforts to ensure that Nigerian medical practitioners return to the country after training abroad.
According to him, it will eventually reduce the number of Nigerians seeking Medicare overseas.
“The NIPRD has embarked on a project to have accreditation to train foreign-trained pharmacists, which had already started yielding positive result.
“A reversal of the brain drain means that we will be able to retain our best practitioners and that will repose confidence in our local practitioners and, ultimately, reverse medical tourism.
“We at NIPRD have started a project of the institute being accredited to train and certify foreign-trained graduates of pharmacy, and we have already started seeing huge increase in those of them returning to Nigeria,” he said.
The director-general also advised that herbal medicines had huge potential to improve the health system and also boost government revenue.
He said that Nigeria had thousands of herbs with medical and pharmaceutical values, with potential to also boost government revenue.
Adigwe assured that Nigeria could reap immense benefit from herbal medicines if properly harnessed and become a hub in the African continent.
“Herbs have a lot of potential; preliminary research indicates that between 8,000 and10.000 plants in Nigeria have ethno-medicinal and ethno-pharmaceutical potentials.
“It is an area that countries like India and China latched on and are making billions of dollars from.
“The potential goes beyond Nigeria, it is Africa-wide; that is why they call it African Traditional Medicine,” he said.
Adigwe said NIPRD was working with relevant stakeholders in its bid to mainstream herbal medicine into conventional medical practice, adding that it had already developed a curriculum for the training of traditional medical practitioners.
“African traditional medicine development is another leg of developing our natural resources, and we are working on ways to mainstream herbal medicine practitioners.
“We have developed a training curriculum for them as part of the process of mainstreaming the practice.
“We have also held collaborative meetings with the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC) on how to make their products have marketability after validation by NIPRD. “We are paying special attention to that area so that we can improve the health of our people and also make money for them,” he said. Adigwe said that NIPRD is presently collaborating with relevant federal government agencies and some state governments to improve the health and wellbeing of Nigerians as well as the economy by exploiting hitherto ignored natural products.
