Nigeria’s healthcare is too underfunded – Dr. Ola Brown
What brought about the idea of Flying Doctors Nigeria? What really made me certain that I wanted to come to Nigeria was actually when my sister died here. She died because she was too old to be moved by road. So, we started looking around for an air ambulance and we couldn’t find one. We […]
What brought about the idea of Flying Doctors Nigeria?
What really made me certain that I wanted to come to Nigeria was actually when my sister died here. She died because she was too old to be moved by road. So, we started looking around for an air ambulance and we couldn’t find one. We tried to organise something from South Africa but we couldn’t and eventually she died. I thought that it’s bad that Nigeria doesn’t have something so simple as an air ambulance. In terms of land size, England is the size of a few states in Nigeria, yet there are about 35 air ambulance services which are fully operational.
I started thinking why isn’t there one here? Not just in Nigeria, but we couldn’t find any in the whole of West Africa. We couldn’t find any in neighbouring countries. That pushed me to start an air ambulance service.
How long have you been running the FDN?
We have been in the business for almost 10 years now.
Are there challenges you’ve come across that are peculiar to your kind of service?
There have been quite a few challenges in terms of general policy, in terms of making sure that our services can reach the less-privileged. But I think most entrepreneurs would say that their most faced challenge is their ability to grow as quickly as possible because I think the faster any founder of a business is able to grow and help other people grow, the easier the business becomes. So rather than focusing on outward problems, I try to focus on the problems that I somehow have control over.
How many aircraft does FDN have?
We have a pool of about 20 aircraft that we use. There are some commercial-size aircraft for our air ambulance spots. We have private aircraft for our individual air ambulance services and helicopters that we use to support the oil and gas sector, the mining industry and also conflict-affected areas around the country; especially in areas of the country that don’t have airports and runways.
Do you have professionals aboard your aircraft?
Yes, mostly doctors and nurses.
Do you have partnership with hospitals abroad?
We have a whole range of partnership with foreign hospitals. We also have our staff that are trained to render medical services on our flights.
Aside air ambulance, do you offer hospital services?
We don’t. Ours is just medical transport.
Dr. Ola Brown
In almost 10 years of FDN’s existence, which major areas have you covered?
We have done a lot of work across West and Central Africa, and obviously in Nigeria too. We are based here and we have done a lot of work here and in countries like Cameroun, Burkina Faso, Mali and some nations in Central Africa as well.
In terms of destination, we have done trips from Maiduguri to Abuja, that’s short distance; from Ilorin to Lagos and we have done some from Mali to Nigeria, and flew patients from Chad to Nigeria. We have done trips that don’t even involve Nigeria, like from Togo to Sierra Lone, Togo to Senegal, and then we do international trips too. We fly people from Lagos to South Africa, Lagos to London, Lagos to as far as China, depending on the medical emergency or circumstances.
Has there been any local competitor that offers similar service?
I don’t think we have anybody that offers the same service, most of our competitors are international.
As an entrepreneur, has Nigeria’s business environment been friendly?
My experience has been very different. I was born in England and I grew up there. While growing up, I didn’t really see many opportunities around me. The only place I saw a lot of successful Nigerians was in Nigeria. Therefore, my mindset was if I wanted to own a bank, an airline or a cement factory, then I actually had to come to Nigeria. Don’t forget, this was about the time when Tony Elumelu had just bought Crystal Bank. I was seeing a Nigerian bank CEO named Fola Adeola and his likes. I was also seeing that a Nigerian could own an airline: ARIK.
So I probably wasn’t looking at challenges as much as people who grew up here. I was looking at the prospects more.
Has your business attracted foreign investment?
No, I haven’t. Everything is not focused on foreign investment and all my funding has been provided by Nigerian banks. I haven’t really gotten foreign investment. I always advise people that foreign investment is all well and good but sometimes you have problems and you can’t go to Silicon Valley or San Francisco to pitch for immediate need, so you have to have relationship with the local banks. I am not 100 per cent happy with the banks. I know that they could do more to help entrepreneurs but all my funding have been done by Nigerian banks.
Can you share your field experiences?
In West Africa we see a bit more of illnesses: heart attack, stroke and other sorts of illnesses, infections, malaria; but in the North East we definitely see more of traumatic illness, violent trauma, gunshot wounds, traffic accidents, bomb blast injuries, spinal cord injuries, etc. So that is really the difference in terms of pathology of clients we transport from the North East of Nigeria.
Dr. Ola Brown with colleagues at work.
Do you offer free air ambulance services to the less-privileged?
We are a private company. I think the primary aim of every business is to make profit. If you are not in the business of making profit, then you don’t really have a business, you have a charity. Out of the profit that we make every year there are few selected cases that we choose to offer free services. The most recent one we did was a young boy who was unable to walk because he had injuries on his legs. He was offered a surgery at a heavily discounted price. The distance by road from where he was to the hospital where he was offered the surgery was probably about 18 hours. So we did a free transfer for him because he needed to lie down and also needed oxygen and full monitoring. If you check on our website, we posted the story because it was really exciting. The boy took his first steps about two weeks ago and that is the first time he has walked in almost years.
With your decade old experience in the nation’s health sector, what are the major challenges facing Nigeria?
I will only talk about one, and that is funding. If Nigeria can sort out the funding issue, I think we have settled 25 per cent of all the challenges. The Nigerian healthcare budget is about a billion dollars per year. Hospitals in Australia and the UK are using that same amount to run one hospital and we are using that amount to take care of the health needs of 180 million people.
As a young Nigerian, who are your mentors?
Mentorship is really an interesting issue for me because coming to Nigeria, my parents were there back in England and I was here on my own. So I get a lot of mentorship from my family members. I also have a lot of business mentors as well, and I probably owe the greatest amount to my female mentors. People always create the impression that women are jealous of each other and that women like to fight each other. I was looking at the recent PDP election where we saw them fighting. Women don’t actually fight like that, men can be very aggressive towards each other; especially when it comes to politics.
From my experience, in politics, business, in everything that I have tried to do, my female mentors have actually been 100 per cent there for me. I can remember discussing politics with a very established former senator a few months ago. I asked him what it would take for me to run for the senate and he immediately said: “Why would you consider something like that, are you not somebody’s wife? Why would you want to do that?” He was embarrassed that I had aspirations, but when I talk to female senators, they always want to show me the way, they tell me the advantages; they are a lot more inspirational.
So one piece of advice that I will give women like myself from my almost 10 years in Nigeria is to keep your female mentors close; they are the people that want your progress. So my female mentors have always been central to my success.