Council urges laboratories to embrace accreditation to reduce medical tourism

The Acting Registrar of the council, Mr Tosan Erhabor made the call in Abuja at the commemoration of the World Accreditation Day marked every June 9 worldwide.

The theme of 2017 celebration is: "Delivering confidence in construction and the built environment."

Erhabor, who decried the current trend of medical tourism with its attendant drain of foreign exchange reserve, however, attributed this to lack of competence in the nation’s diagnosis services.

He noted that accredited medical laboratories would reduce medical tourism and further assist in increasing the country’s GDP among others.

Erhabor defined accreditation as a process of providing recognition to an organisation of its competence in performing specific task.

He further said that the day was aimed at raising awareness on the importance of accreditation to health care providers and users.

The acting registrar said that accredited medical laboratories would help to encourage provision of qualitative service delivery thereby reducing medical tourism.

According to him, accreditation has been used all over the world as a tool to facilitate trade in order that the data and test results issued by laboratories and inspection bodies are accepted globally.

Erhabor identified one of the outcomes of accreditation as removal of technical and trade barriers such as retesting of products each time they enter new economy environment.

He described the theme as a rare opportunity to look deeper into the critical issues that relate to qualitative service delivery in medical laboratories.

The registrar said the council was poised to fulfill its statutory mandate to support the Federal Government’s policy of diversification of the nation’s economy through infrastructure and human capital development in the health sector.

According to him, this will ultimately discourage health tourism and reverse the current trend.

"The world accreditation day is a global initiative jointly established by the International Accreditation Forum (IAF) and the International Laboratory Accreditation Cooperation (ILAC) to raise awareness on the importance of accreditation.

"The theme focuses on how accreditation can support professionals in construction industry and the Medical laboratories facilities in terms of quality services.

"Accreditation is an impartial and objective process carried out by third parties that offers the least duplicative, most transparent, most acceptable and the least discriminatory route for the formal recognition and world-wide of credible and trustworthy conformity assessment results.

"The council has so far accredited three deserving medical laboratories in Nigeria which are Clina-Lancet Laboratories, Victoria Island Lagos, 561 Nigeria Air Force (Hospital) Lab. Ikeja and El-Lab Laboratories Ltd , Festac," Erhabor said.