Efficient Health Sector Depends on Administrators — Cleric
A cleric, Venerable Osazee Egbenusi, has called for better recognition and treatment of health administrators, describing them as crucial to the smooth running of the health sector in Nigeria.
Egbenusi made the call on Tuesday in Benin at a public lecture organised by the Institute of Health Service Administrators of Nigeria (IHSAN), University of Benin Teaching Hospital (UBTH) chapter.
Speaking on the theme centred on diligence and capacity building, the cleric, who is also an engineer and a lawyer, said health service administration suffers from invisibility, essential when it works, but only noticed when it fails.
“When a hospital runs well — when records are available, when supplies arrive, when a patient’s admission is processed without three hours of confusion, when a referral letter reaches the right desk on the right day, almost no one notices,” he said.
“No patient leaves a teaching hospital praising the administrator who ensured their file didn’t get lost. But when any one of those things fails, everyone notices immediately.”
He added, “This is the peculiar burden of health service administration: it is essential precisely to the degree that it is invisible. A surgeon’s skill is seen in the operating theatre. A nurse’s compassion is seen at the bedside. But an administrator’s diligence is seen only in its absence, in the missing file, the stalled procurement, the referral that never arrived.”
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Egbenusi noted that despite changing times and the deployment of modern technology in the health sector, the diligence of administrators continues to have a positive impact on service delivery.
He said the theme, framed around “still diligent,” places emphasis on sustained commitment, not occasional effort.
“Anyone can be diligent for a week, or a month, in the first flush of enthusiasm for a new role,” he said. “The question this Institute is actually asking of itself, by choosing capacity-building as its founding priority, is a harder one: what sustains diligence across years, across a system that is changing faster than most of us were trained to expect, and often without the resources, recognition, or reward that would make sustained diligence easy?”
He charged administrators to adopt diligence as a mindset, commit to continuous learning, and uphold integrity in unseen decisions, where true diligence is proven.
He also urged them to keep the patient at the centre of administrative work, even when they only interact with files, and to respect all professions working alongside them while insisting on the respect their own profession has earned.
“A hospital that holds together needs administrators who have not allowed a difficult system to quietly defeat them,” Egbenusi said.
“Every functioning hospital in the world rests, ultimately, on two kinds of excellence working together: the visible excellence of clinical skill, and the invisible excellence of administrative diligence. History remembers the surgeons.
“It rarely remembers the administrator who made sure the surgeon had a functioning theatre, a properly documented patient, a supply chain that did not fail at the critical moment,” he concluded.
