The University's 26th Inaugural Lecture held on the 7th of february 2019 at the Main Auditorium of Babcock Business School. The lecturer for the day was Professor Nnodimele Onuigbo Atulomah, A professor of Public Health and Health Promotion. The topic of his lecture was THE SICK PEOPLE OF NIGERIA: A Symptom of Health System in Distress. The lecture is scheduled for 2:00pm prompt.

The Nigerian public health sector may lose its value in disease prevention and control if health promotion is not given its pride of place.

Public Health promoter, Professor Nnodimele Atulomah expressed this concern while delivering the University’s 26th inaugural lecture.
Professor Atulomah noted that health promotion was critical in solving Nigeria’s health problems because of its role in disease and poverty prevention through policy advocacy. In his paper, The sick people of Nigeria: A system of health system in distress.he observed that there was a global explosion of new diseases occasioned by increasing cost in healthcare as well as deteriorating public health from poor lifestyle and rap-id technological advancement.

He therefore called for prevention pro-grammes that would focus on health promotion model and the training of more specialist health workers to mitigate the situation.

According to him, this calls for a strategic multi-disciplinary approach where every pro-fessional group in the health system is given the appropriate recognition and every oppor-tunity accruable to the profession.

He also recommended the establishment of a strong primary prevention modality and an effec-tive referral system for secondary prevention mo-dalities at both the local government and general hospital settings respectively.

According to him, this can be achieved through strategic policy reforms of the National Primary Health Care Development Agency; the agency responsible for maintaining and supervising out-comes in Public Health Care (PHC) service deliv-ery.

Professor Atulomah warned that Nigeria would continue to have a large population of sick people if it failed to implement the needed reforms in the health care system as well as develop a more proactive approach to environmental sanitation, personal hygiene and quarantine practices.