The Lagos State Government has begun phased renovations of General Hospitals across the state, in line with its commitment to improving healthcare infrastructure in the country.
This was disclosed by the state government by the Lagos State Commissioner for Health Akin Abayomi during an inspection of two General Hospital being refurbished.
The two health facilities inspected by the commissioner were the Harvey Road Health Centre and the Ebute Metta Health Centre.
He said that it is the plan of the state government to “do a deep refurbishment” of all general hospitals in the state, raising their standards to globally acceptable standards.
Abayomi said, “Mr. Governor already knows the state of the General Hospitals and his mandate is that we do a deep refurbishment in all the general hospitals and bring them all up to the standard that is acceptable globally.
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“Instead of repairing the general hospitals in little pieces every year, we are coming to a number of hospitals every year to do a complete refurbishing so that by the time we finish, it will look like a brand new hospital. We intend to refurbish between six-eight hospitals in a year.”
Reducing Hospitals’ Carbon Footprints
The commissioner noted that the state was working to ensure that hospitals reduced their carbon footprints, keeping them running on low energy.
He said, “We are trying to keep the hospitals on low energy and low carbon footprints; we don’t want the Medical Directors to spend their IGR on diesel and fueling Generators.
“So, where we can cool a building down naturally and use renewable energy like solar or natural ventilators or inverters, we would do that just to bring down the carbon footprints of all our medical infrastructure and reduce the use of fossil fuel and generally, redesign the building or rehabilitate it to be a lot cooler, among others.
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“With the ongoing refurbishment and roll out of the Governor’s medical infrastructure blueprint, the medical infrastructure landscape of the State would look completely different. Our attention would focus on maintenance because there is no point coming in doing a deep refurbishment only to allow it to disintegrate afterwards.
“Once we have done a deep refurbishment, we have an agency that is responsible for maintenance and they are part of the refurbishment strategy and once we finish, then we are going to have what we call a maintenance culture to make sure the infrastructure does not suffer dilapidation due to neglect.
“All the engineers on-site would focus on maintenance and LASIAMA would come in and set up a facility the management programme and make sure the deep refurbishment done is adequately maintained.”
