N’Assembly, council partner to improve medical diagnosis

REALISING that inaccurate diagnosis is a major cause of deaths in Nigeria, the National Assembly and the Medical Laboratory Science Council of Nigeria have forged a partnership to improve the quality of results generated from Nigeria’s medical laboratories.

At a medical laboratory services forum held in Abuja yesterday, the need to check foreign medical treatments by boosting local diagnosis was a major focus, as stakeholders called attention to improved funding support from government.

On his part, Chairman of the House of Representatives Committee on Health, Ndudi Elumelu, stressed the importance of medical laboratory scientists.

His words: “Without your diagnostic results of body fluids obtained from patients, medical doctors cannot examine the patients, nurses cannot conduct any treatment of the patients and pharmacists cannot even prescribe any drug for the patients. Therefore, it is not an exaggeration to affirm that you are the first among equals.

“It has been established that the bedrock of any medical treatment is the test or diagnosis conducted by a medical laboratory scientist on the patient’s body fluids or other specimen obtained from the patients. The evaluation or judgment of the medical doctor on the patient’s condition is dependent on your diagnosis. If anything is wrong with your diagnosis or a patient’s blood samples or body fluids were not diagnosed by you before the patient was treated, the end results would be very clear and your guess is as good as mine.”