State house clinic to scale down public access to facilities over ‘lean resources’

The State House Clinic has announced plans to scale down the number of persons authorised to access medical attention at its Asokoro facility located, in Abuja.

The authorities on Thursday, said the dwindling resources leading to a lean budgetary allocation to the facility has made the decision inevitable.

Specifically, the Clinic was established to provide health care services to the President and Vice President, as well as their families and members of staff working in the Presidential Villa, but now caters for about 32,000 patients which the authorities say “is not sustainable.”

The Permanent Secretary, State House, Tijjani Umar said the authorities were determined to eliminate those he described as “hangers-on” and extend services to only those who are officially entitled to access the health care facility.

He said: “We are going to trim down the number of unentitled people. Unentitled bringing constraints to us, bringing issues, that’s all. If you have five children in your house, neighbours send like 20 every evening to come, your pot will not be enough. That’s what we are saying.

“This will assist us to look at those areas requiring improvement. The biggest room in the world is the room for improvement.”

The Permanent Secretary said the Clinic used to be a yardstick for performance measurement in the medical enclave and pride of the highly trained and experienced personnel working there.

However, over the recent years, it was observed that services rendered at the clinic to the privileged few suffered noticeable decline to almost zero service delivery.

“This resulted in a mockery of the facility and loss of confidence by its customers on its ability to render effective service. In an effort to upturn this ugly trend and revive its past glory, the State House Management reversed the Medical Centre profile granted the facility, to its original status of Clinic, to limit the number of patients it handles and also maintain the original purpose it was created for.

“In order to further improve service delivery in the Clinic, an outpatient survey was conducted in October 2019, by the SERVICOM National Office and the State House SERVICOM unit. A Report on that regard had since been forwarded to me and to review the findings of the survey, as well as propose an action plan indicating short, medium and long term actions, to improve service delivery at the Clinic,” he said.

The Permanent Secretary further said the authorities were also determined to address the frequent power outage at the clinic, which had been a major challenge to effective service provision by the hospital.

“We are going to do everything we can to ensure that we stay up fine and in top shape serving our patients. So, it’s like an across the board kind of improvement that I am talking about.”

“It simply means that the lean resources of today might not allow us to achieve our aim. Only through that, and therefore we need partnerships, we need relationships,”