‘Administrators crucial to smooth running of health sector’

A cleric, Venerable Osazee Egbenusi has called for better treatment of health administrators, saying they are crucial to the smooth running of the health sector in Nigeria.

Egbenusi stated this at a public lecture organised by the Institute of Health Service Administrators of Nigeria, University of Benin Teaching Hospital chapter on Tuesday.

He noted that despite the changing times and the use of modern technology in the health sector, the ability of the administrators to deliver their jobs diligently has impacted positively on the health sector.

“Let me begin with an observation I suspect many persons in this hall have lived, in one form or another. When a hospital runs well — when records are available, when supplies arrive, when a patient’s admission is processed without three hours of confusion, when a referral letter reaches the right desk on the right day, almost no one notices.

“No patient leaves a teaching hospital praising the administrator who ensured their file didn’t get lost. But when any one of those things fails, everyone notices immediately, and the blame, fairly or not, tends to land everywhere except where the actual failure occurred.

“This is the peculiar burden of health service administration: it is essential precisely to the degree that it is invisible. A surgeon’s skill is seen in the operating theatre. A nurse’s compassion is seen at the bedside. But an administrator’s diligence is seen only in its absence — in the missing file, the stalled procurement, the referral that never arrived.

“That is exactly why the theme before us this afternoon matters so much: what kind of mindset sustains diligence in work that is essential, constant, and almost entirely unapplauded?, he added.

He added, “Our theme this afternoon is framed as “still diligent,” and I want you to notice the weight carried by that single word, “still.” Anyone can be diligent for a week, or a month, in the first flush of enthusiasm for a new role.

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“The question this Institute is actually asking of itself, by choosing capacity-building as its founding priority, is a harder one: what sustains diligence across years, across a system that is changing faster than most of us were trained to expect, and often without the resources, recognition, or reward that would make sustained diligence easy? That is the real subject of what follows.”

Egbenusi who is also an engineer and a lawyer, charged the administrators to let diligence be their mindset and not merely occasional effort, learn continuously, because the system will not slow down to wait for them.

He also urged them to guard integrity in the unseen decision, noting that, that is where diligence is actually proven, far more than in any decision made under supervision.

He also called on them to remember the patient behind every file, even when the file is all you ever see, so that the human cost of their work never becomes invisible to them, even where it remains invisible to others.

He also charged them to respect every profession working alongside them, insist on the respect their profession has rightly earned, and carry all of this with resilience rather than bitterness, adding, “a hospital that holds together needs administrators who have not allowed a difficult system to quietly defeat them

“Every functioning hospital in the world rests, ultimately, on two kinds of excellence working together: the visible excellence of clinical skill, and the invisible excellence of administrative diligence. History remembers the surgeons. It rarely remembers the administrator who made sure the surgeon had a functioning theatre, a properly documented patient, a supply chain that did not fail at the critical moment,” he concluded.