THISDAY, Access Bank, Others Nominated for Healthcare Award

Martins Ifijeh
THISDAY Newspapers, Access Bank Plc, Lagos State University Teaching Hospital (LASUTH), and over 100 persons and organisations have been nominated for the 2018 Nigeria Healthcare Excellent Award (NHEA).

The award, which will hold on June 22 at Eko Hotel and Suites in Lagos, will recognise healthcare practitioners and organisations that have distinguished themselves in the pursuit of better healthcare services to Nigerians in the year under review (June 2017 to June 2018).

Stating this in a press conference to announce the nominees in Lagos recently, the Chairman, Advisory Board of NHEA, Dr. Anthony Omolola, said the awards, tagged: ‘Oscar of Healthcare in Nigeria’, being in its fifth year, has propelled many healthcare providers to push towards quality delivery of services, adding that it has brought a healthy competition to the sector.

According to Omolola, “We used internationally recognised standards and criteria to evaluate our nominees before presenting them to the public to vote for anyone of their choice. We are confident that those who will receive special recognitions and the winners of the medical, pharmaceutical and biomedical award categories, will no doubt, continue to be motivators and positive influencers to drive the Nigerian healthcare forward.”

Moreover, Omolola said two newly introduced categories were testaments of the determination of the organisers to continuously improve and expand the scope to accommodate more stakeholders who are making unique contributions to care giving in Nigeria.
Safecare Facilities of the Year and Healthcare Media Excellence Award (Online) are the newly introduced categories.

 “There have been tremendous improvements in terms of voting. The process is rigorous, and we have made sure there is the e-voting platform which enables everyone to vote any organisation or persons of their choice. We use to have 7,000 e-voting but as at now, we have gotten over 14,000 votes,” he said.

The NHEA will confer its 2018 Lifetime Achievements Awards on a seasoned Pharmacist and General Secretary of the Nigerian Academy of Pharmacy, Prof.
Fola Tayo, and the Chief Medical Director, Federal Medical Centre, Yola,  Prof. Auwal Abubakar, for their immense contribution to healthcare in Nigeria.

Among those nominated in different categories are St. Nicholas Hospital, for Dialysis Service Provider of the Year; Glaxosmithkline Pharmaceutical Limited, for Pharmaceutical Manufacturing Company of the Year; I Care Family Vision Centre, for Eye Care Service Provider of the Year; Healthplus Pharmacy, for Pharmaceutical Retail Outlet of the Year; The Bridge Clinic, for IVF Service Provider of the Year among others.

The award ceremony will have key government officials, healthcare professionals, representatives of key financial institutions, diplomatic community, NGOs and the media in attendance, and will be streamed live on social media to different audience across the world.
NHEA, organised by Global Health Project and Resources (GHPR) in collaboration with Anadach, United States, is supported by PharmAccess Foundation and TStv.
THISDAY won the NHEA print media category in 2016.