Anthony Iwuoma
The Federal Government has approved more private hospitals to treat COVID-19 cases because government facilities are now overstretched due to the daily rise in new cases of the pandemic.
This contrasts with government’s earlier stance that private hospitals were barred from treating patients.
The Minister of Health, Dr. Osagie Ehanire, on Tuesday, announced that more private hospitals in Lagos and other parts of the country had been accredited to treat patients infected by the virus.
“Government hospitals and teaching hospitals have been examined and accredited and some state hospitals as well. Private hospitals, some in Lagos have been accredited but I can’t give you the exact number. But they have been accredited by the teams sent to the states,” the minister disclosed at the daily briefing by the Presidential Task Force (PTF) on COVID-19 control, in Abuja.
He added that government has also despatched personnel to other some parts of the country to assess private hospitals for the purpose of allowing them to treat patients if they satisfy the protocols given by the PTF.
The minister said: “We have developed a protocol for accreditation. They have been given to many of the states. Special teams have been sent out to help. The team that was sent to Kano has already visited about four states in the North to help set up the accreditation.
“If you as a private hospital want to run a treatment centre for Coronavirus, you have to show first of all that you have the staff; a doctor who must be an infectious disease specialist and nurses and even cleaners who are trained in infection prevention protocol. The operations are different from what obtains in other hospitals.”
