Q-Life Family Clinic was founded out of a need and desire to solve the following problems we identified in Nigerian healthcare:
- A need to bring the level of health care services to globally acceptable standards that our clients deserve.
- The need to define health care services properly in this environment. There are three tiers of health care as recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO) and practiced in industrialized nations. These are primary, secondary and tertiary.
The primary should be the first point of contact with the health care services. At this level, 80% of the common health needs of 80% of the people can be managed. Cases outside this, must be promptly referred to the secondary level.
Primary does not connote ordinary or inferior as people have usually interpreted it to mean. It is the place to go for regular check-ups and immunizations or once you start feeling unwell. The GPs in England or the Family Physicians in the United States work at this level. This is the level at which Q-life Family Clinic operates.
- The utilization trend of the levels of health care service in this environment was observed to be different from the expected. Most people prefer to go straight to the specialties. This made us realize that the public was not well informed about the primary level of health care, which is critical to their overall well-being. Consequently there has been an overwhelming of the secondary level of health care and a lot of distractions for the specialists at this level.
- There was also a need to bring some credibility and accountability into the delivery of health care.
