Lagos inaugurates 39-member task force on patient safety

By Adebola Muili

Lagos State Government has inaugurated a 39-member Task Force on Clinical Governance and Patient Safety, with a three-month mandate to develop a statewide framework for improving healthcare standards, protecting patients and strengthening accountability across the sector.

The task force, inaugurated on Monday at Sojourn by Genesis Hotel, Ikeja, comprises representatives of government agencies, healthcare institutions, professional bodies, private healthcare providers, civil society organisations and technical experts.

Speaking at the inauguration, the Commissioner for Health, Prof. Akin Abayomi, said the initiative was aimed at strengthening confidence in the state’s healthcare system and ensuring that clinical governance covered both public and private healthcare facilities.

Abayomi said the private sector dominated healthcare provision in Lagos, with an estimated ratio of about 10 private facilities to one government-owned facility, making it necessary for the state’s clinical governance system to cover the entire healthcare ecosystem.

“We are not the Ministry of Health for government facilities alone; we are the Ministry of Health for Lagos,” he said.

The commissioner, however, noted that public health facilities still accounted for as much as 40 per cent of patient encounters in the state, putting significant pressure on government hospitals, infrastructure and health personnel.

He also called for greater attention to informal and unorthodox healthcare providers, including traditional medicine practitioners, patent medicine vendors and community pharmacies.

According to him, the increasing use of task-shifting and task-sharing to address shortages of health personnel makes it necessary to ensure that healthcare services delivered outside conventional hospital settings are guided by appropriate standards.

Abayomi said clinical governance should cover clinical audits, evidence-based medical practice, digital health tools and continuous professional development, while healthcare workers should also be protected from violence.

He identified fever management as a possible pilot area for the new system, stressing the need for healthcare workers to rely on diagnostic testing rather than automatically treating every fever case as malaria.

“It is no longer appropriate to make a clinical diagnosis of malaria without appropriate testing,” he said.

The Special Adviser to the Governor on Health and Chairman of the Task Force, Dr. Kemi Ogunyemi, said the body was established to create a unified platform for determining standards of care, improving patient safety and ensuring accountability across Lagos’ healthcare system.

Ogunyemi said the Lagos State Clinical Governance and Patient Safety Framework would address minimum standards for healthcare facilities, incident reporting and learning, patient feedback and redress, measurable indicators and implementation structures.

She said the framework would be built around seven pillars: leadership and governance; clinical effectiveness; risk management; patient and public involvement; clinical audit; staff development and management; and information management.

According to her, the three-month assignment would not involve creating policies from scratch, but reviewing existing state and national policies, identifying gaps and recommending additional systems where necessary.

“We are not seeking to dictate standards. We are using the best available evidence to determine what is appropriate for Lagos State and what will ensure that patients are safe,” Ogunyemi said.

She said the process would be evidence-driven rather than punitive, adding that existing quality-improvement programmes would be coordinated under the new framework.

“Behind every incident report is a person who came to us for help,” she said.

Ogunyemi, who is also a member of the National Task Force on Clinical Governance and Patient Safety, said the growing national conversation on patient safety had been heightened by the widely publicised death of a celebrity’s son in a private healthcare facility.

She said the incident underscored the need for structured interventions to improve standards and accountability within Nigeria’s healthcare system, adding that the Lagos initiative would enable the state to translate the national effort into a framework suited to its healthcare environment.

The Permanent Secretary, Lagos State Ministry of Health, Dr. Dayo Lajide, described the inauguration as timely and consistent with the direction of the Federal Ministry of Health and Social Welfare.

Lajide said the broad composition of the task force showed that clinical governance could not be achieved by government alone.

“Clinical governance is that discipline that makes the expectation a property of the system, rather than a matter of individual conscience,” she said.

She assured the task force of technical support from the ministry through a secretariat that would coordinate documentation, administration and continuity throughout the three-month assignment.

Also speaking, the Permanent Secretary, Health Service Commission, Dr. Olufemi Omololu, said the framework would consolidate existing quality-improvement initiatives in the state’s health system, including the Service Charter, Clinical Quality Improvement, Total Quality Management, 5S and Maternal and Perinatal Death Surveillance and Response.

Omololu described clinical governance as a systematic approach to ensuring that healthcare is safe, effective, patient-centred, accountable and continuously improved.

He said the framework would promote the use of standard treatment guidelines, clinical audits, incident reporting, patient feedback, staff development and health information in improving healthcare delivery.

He cautioned against turning clinical governance into a mechanism for punishing healthcare workers, citing the “no name, no blame” principle under the Maternal and Perinatal Death Surveillance and Response programme as an approach that encourages health workers to report problems and participate in finding solutions.

The Technical Secretary of the task force, Dr. Tolu Ajomale, said members would commence work immediately with the selection of chairpersons and deputies for the seven pillars, appointment of secretaries and establishment of communication platforms for the various workstreams.

Ajomale said each pillar would work throughout the three-month period before presenting its findings and recommendations to the full task force.

The task force is expected to produce a unified framework that will guide patient safety, clinical standards, incident reporting, professional development, patient feedback and quality improvement across Lagos’ public and private healthcare system.