A Professor of Paediatric Surgery at the University of Lagos, Adesoji Ademuyiwa, has called for free surgeries for neonates.
A neonate, a newborn, is a child under 28 days old. The first 28 days of a child’s life is called the neonatal period; a time of rapid change.
Ademuyiwa made the call for free surgery for this category of children during his inaugural lecture on Wednesday at the University of Lagos.
The lecture, the second in the 2024/2025 academic session, was themed: ‘Suffer Little Children to Come Unto Me; the Surgeon’s Sojourn in Collaborative Research.’
Ademuyiwa recalled that one of the advocacy surgeons had made, over time, was that surgery fees for children should be waived.
He explained that there should not be any financial cost for the children because they did not come to the world by themselves and it was not their fault that they had health challenges.
According to him, children have been neglected in access to surgery.
“We looked at neonates, they are children less than 28 days old, and we found out that the risk of death was far higher among these group of patients compared to other patients.
“We then notice certain characteristics that lead to such conditions. For example, sepsis, reoperation, and bleeding are things that lead to death among this group of children.
“W advocated that this should be prevented. Our study shows that even though we are not on par with high-income countries, our practice in Nigeria is still one of the best in Africa,” he said.
Ademuyiwa said that studies had shown that it was possible to perform primary surgery in neonates for free as well as in adults.
He said that the one for adults was not popular but surgeons had shown that it was possible.
The paediatrician reiterated that surgery should, however, be free, for newborns, and that the government should pay for it “because children were the future.”
He added that the condition of service for medical practitioners needed to be improved to retain young specialists leaving the country.
According to him, all his recommendations are doable because the cost involved is small compared to some of the budgets being announced by the government, daily, on other things.
NAN
