How I Turned Survival into Healthcare Revolution – THISDAYLIVE

Ifeel so grateful to God and to humanity for the opportunity to live up to 50 years. I never thought I would live this long because of the near-death incident that I had 15 years ago. I was shot by armed robbers on my neck while I was coming from Port Harcourt, and I didn’t think I was going to survive it, but a driver took me to LUTH and because I had health insurance, I was able to access care at LUTH. I had two surgeries done, four blood transfused, an angiogram, and I had about 20 pellets removed from my neck. I give God the glory, none of the pellets touched any of my blood vessels. And to date, I still carry about 20 pellets in my neck, those that were deep inside that they couldn’t remove. I am grateful to God who spared me and gave me another chance to live. So I decided I was going to give back to those who cannot afford my service as a doctor. So we decided to set up the Orange Health initiative, an NGO. We later set up the Orange Health Medical Center, and today, I would say that instead of just jubilating, we decided that we are going to use the opportunity to also set up the lab, diagnostics and emergency center. Why are we doing this? We want to give back to those who cannot afford our service. We want to give every Nigerian the opportunity to have affordable, accessible, and excellent quality health care. We believe that we can give the best quality of care that is obtained anywhere in the world. We can give it here in Nigeria. And we want to start with the low income areas. So we decided to come to Ajegunle where the population is large but the ability to pay is quite low. So today, we are not just celebrating my 50th birthday, we are also launching the diagnostic lab and emergency care center.

 In terms of ensuring affordable and accessible health care, if you have to look at the number of people that you have catered for in a place like this, can you put a figure to that?

We have our data. Currently, we’ve seen over 5,000 people in the space of three years. We’ve done over 100 surgeries. We have over 40 health maintenance organisations that are working with us. We also created our own health insurance model. We believe that everybody should have one form of health insurance or another. Health insurance is now mandatory. We have the national health insurance scheme. We have the State Health Insurance Scheme. We have the private health insurance scheme at best, even with all that, we still have less than 10 per cent of the entire population having a form of health insurance. So we decided that in a community where we serve, we started a form of health insurance concept. We call it Ajo health. This is an appropriate technology, the technology that people are used to. So we collect ajo just like the local people and they save their money with us, and we remove 50 naira every day for their health insurance. So anytime they are sick, they have the opportunity of coming to the hospital and being cared for without paying and at the same time, we are also using that opportunity to make them partners in the hospital, because the money we’re able to collect from them and keep for them, we’re able to use it to run the hospital, to develop the hospital, and be able to serve more of the people. To us, we’ve been able to create visible impact in terms of obstetric delivery, in terms of child care, in terms of surgical care and geriatric care.

In fact, when we started, we started a concept called Sunday clinic, where we bring people who are 60 years and above, we bring them in every Sunday, and we take care of them at low cost. We do consultation for them, we do investigation for them, we do give them medications, and then for that Sunday, and we give them appointments again. We were able to save as many people as could have had diabetes, hypertension, or arthritis, and a lot of them became our patients, and today, that’s why we’re able to see that number of people. And for sustainability, of course, we have the health insurance companies partnering with us. Like I said, we have about 40 health insurance companies that we are able to partner with, the likes of AXA Mansad, the likes of Midway Assurance, the likes of Hajia HMO, Claireline HMO, to name just a few. And so to us, health is not just wealth, health is everything. There’s no aspect of the human life that doesn’t pertain to our health. We, we don’t take health as being wealth, we take health as being everything and we go the extra mile to make sure we’re able to give quality, affordable, accessible healthcare to the people of Ajegunle.

 You been able to introduce some new concepts to orange health. What is the next big thing for the hospital?

Now our target is that we want to register 60 per cent of the entire population, which will be able to have them being able to see us as their go- to hospital. Now, there are four cardinal things that we focus on. First, we focus on quality health service. We take each of these as projects. We have quality projects where we have quality manual, we look at the gap, what has a gap in our service? We begin to do a gap analysis, and then do those things that are not there. We have SOPs for every area of our service, so quality is our number one key. Then we have client retention. We want to ensure that everybody that has visited us, we’re able to retain them and we are able to provide them not just satisfactory service, but we want to delight them. We want them to be obsessed with our service. So, we want to retain everybody that has ever been with us. Our thought is that we want to generate new clients. We want more people to know us. We want more people to come and taste our service. We do what we call evidence. When you come into our center, it’s very beautiful. So anybody that comes in will see the choice of colour, the beauty and people wants to see an evidence that it is a health facility and its clean, nice and attractive.

We want them to experience our nurses, our services, our doctors, our laboratory, our results, our outcomes. When they experience these and they are satisfied, we want them to be the one to be acknowledging and referring people. So after looking at the quality, client retention and client generation, we want to ensure financial sustainability. Whatever funds we are raising, we are generating, we are pumping back into the system, expanding on our service being able to do more. Come 2026, we want to be able to do more surgeries. We want to come out with surgical programs where people can book for surgeries throughout the year because surgery is a major aspect of healthcare, and a lot of people are unable to access surgical services through qualified personnel.

  How does the organisation’s vision of giving back, expanding quality healthcare with limited funding, and encouraging medical professionals to remain and serve in Nigeria shape your call for public support?

We believe that we cannot do this alone. We started this as a way of saying thank you for the accident that I had, and I was able to survive it. We are giving back. So we are not just taking it as a business; it is a corporate social responsibility. We believe that as medical practitioners, we must take ownership and responsibility of the health of our people. So that’s what we are doing. We want to expand more. We want to be able to do more and go beyond just Ajegunle.

We have proved the concept that we need little or no finance. We can actually set up quality healthcare service that can be improved and expanded. You want to be like a mentor or an example to doctors, to medical practitioners that are looking at the Japa syndrome, that look, there’s there are goals still in Nigeria, and the population is there, the satisfaction of service can be achieved. Even with little or no funding, you can actually serve your people and make something meaningful out of it. And so lastly, we are asking that people should support us. If you are inspired by Orange Health Medical Center, Orange Health Initiative, you can Google us. You can check us on social media, and whatever amount you can give to support us, that money will be used to improve our health care services.