… as $300m facility opens Thursday to create over 5,000 jobs
Afreximbank’s $300 million African Medical Centre of Excellence (AMCE) in Abuja is set for official launch on Thursday, targeting to plug Nigeria’s over $2 billion annual foreign exchange losses to medical tourism and related foreign exchange outflows.
The Ministry of Health and Social Welfare put Nigeria’s loss to medical tourism at over $2 billion annually.
The facility is Africa’s first Medical Centre of Excellence and is in partnership with the King’s College, London. Nigeria was selected in 2016 to host the pilot AMCE following a competitive bidding process involving Ghana, Kenya and Tanzania.
Oluranti Doherty, Managing Director of Export Development at Afreximbank, speaking during a media tour of the facility on Tuesday, said the Abuja Centre is the first of a series of Regional Centres designed to curb outbound medical travel and improve Africa’s capacity to treat non-communicable diseases.
According to her, the AMCE represents “a bold statement that speaks to what is possible when Africa takes ownership of its future and economic development.
“For us, healthcare is seen as a security for the continent. In 2014–2015, we undertook a business study of what leads to outbound medical tourism from the continent and one of the critical factors we could establish was the outflows that we lose to outbound medical tourism”.
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She recounted how the bank’s research into outbound medical tourism, particularly to India, Europe and the Americas, highlighted the urgent need for high-quality regional medical infrastructure.
“We will eliminate the need for costly international travel and associated expenses such as accommodation when people go out of the country to seek medical treatments”, she noted.
Doherty highlighted the Centre’s role in reversing medical brain drain and supporting training for African clinicians, while noting that the Abuja facility had already recruited Nigerian medical professionals from the diaspora.
“We are poised to start tackling head-on the long-standing challenges of medical tourism, limited access to care, and the drain of skilled medical professionals from our country”, she further said.
She also assured that the bank, working with its partners, would put in place mechanisms to see to the fact that no one is left behind in accessing care.
Brian Deaver, Chief Executive Officer of AMCE, detailed the Centre’s technological capabilities, including the continent’s most advanced clinical testing facilities.
“We will deliver tumour sequencing within 72 hours, driving targeted therapy decisions. High throughput, clinical chemistry and immunoassay lines, capable of 2,000 samples per hour, with bar-coded chain of custody from vein to results”, he noted.
He added: “We have an advanced level two microbiology suite, comprehensive bone marrow transplant unit, negative pressure isolation suites and cryogenic stem cell storage. And finally, a critical care command centr monitored by predictive analytics dashboards that flag sepsis or respiratory compromise long before vital signs crash.”
Deaver informed that over 300 clinicians, nurses, technologists and engineers from multiple nations are already onboard, with the operations expected to create 1,200 direct and 4,000 indirect jobs. He noted that the construction phase alone generated close to 2,000 jobs.
The facility will also feature a cyclotron, enhancing African diagnostic and therapeutic capabilities. A cyclotron is an advanced medical imaging technology used to diagnose and treat complex diseases like cancer, cardiovascular diseases, and neurological disorders, which are areas of AMCE’s specialty.
