NSIA LUTH treats over 10,000 patients in five years -CMD
Prof. Wasiu Adeyemo, Chief Medical Director (CMD) Lagos University Teaching Hospital (LUTH) says the NSIA-LUTH Cancer Centre (NLCC) has treated over 10,000 patients since inception in 2019.
Adeyemo said this in Lagos on Wednesday, at the side-lines of the cancer centre five years anniversary.
The CMD said that prior to the period; a large number of patients could not access care because the machines were not working across the country.
He said the centre was a Private Partnership Plan (PPP) facility which was a model that was working.
Adeyemo said because of the success it has recorded, the present administration has budgeted for it with additional five sites to be sited across the country.
He said that what the centre celebrated was success, what it has achieved and things that were possible in Nigeria using the right model.
Speaking at the anniversary, Prof Abayomi Durosimi-Etti, Chief Clinical Oncologist, said at the moment, NLCC was the best cancer centre in the West Africa.
Durosimi-Etti said that survival was a factor of how late one visit the centre, adding that if detected early, with the modern machines, NLCC could boast of possibility of curing that cancer.
He said the challenge facing treatment of patients was shortage of staff and cost of care, adding that the escalating cost of care was not only in Nigeria.
He, however, appealed for a functional National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) to take care of real cancer indigent patients.
Also, Dr Tolulope Adewole, Chairman, Board of LUTH NSIA cancer centre said that NLCC has had interactions with 500,000 patients of the 10,000 it had treated.
Adewole said that they are elated because before they embarked on this journey there was only one linear accelerator in the country.
He said that the story has always been that it could not be done that Nigerians could not run linear accelerator because of its technicalities of the machine.
According to him, this statement has been proven not to be correct, since we have shown that there are endless impossibly in Nigeria.
