Healthcare in Lagos is excellent in places, overstretched in others, and almost always paid for at the point of care. The single most useful thing you can do is choose your clinic and hospital before you are ill, because deciding in a traffic jam with a feverish child is how people end up in the wrong place.
Private clinics and hospitals
Most people who can pay use a private clinic for everyday care and a private hospital for anything serious. Expect:
- To pay before you are treated, or to leave a deposit, unless you are covered by health insurance and the hospital is on your plan’s list.
- To be asked which HMO you are with. A health maintenance organisation administers most insurance plans; you are registered with one primary hospital and need the HMO’s authorisation for referrals and specialists.
- Wide variation in quality, which is not always reflected in the price. Ask colleagues and neighbours where they go, and where they would take a child at night.
Health insurance and Ilera Eko
Public hospitals
The public system has three tiers:
- Primary health centres, in every local government area, for routine care, antenatal care and immunisation.
- General hospitals, run by Lagos State, across the city.
- Teaching hospitals - the Lagos University Teaching Hospital (LUTH) at Idi-Araba and the Lagos State University Teaching Hospital (LASUTH) in Ikeja - where the specialists are and where complex cases end up.
Public care costs far less. The queues are long, the facilities are stretched, and you will often be sent out to buy drugs and supplies yourself. For serious and complex conditions, though, the teaching hospitals are where many private hospitals refer their own patients.
For mental health, the Federal Neuro-Psychiatric Hospital, Yaba is the city’s specialist hospital.
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Pharmacies
A pharmacy is run by a registered pharmacist. A patent medicine store, the small chemist on every street, is not a pharmacy, and is licensed to sell only a limited list of medicines - whatever it actually stocks.
Many medicines that need a prescription elsewhere, antibiotics included, are sold over the counter in Lagos. That is convenient and also how resistance spreads; take antibiotics when a doctor has decided you need them.
Counterfeit and substandard medicines are a real problem. Buy from a registered pharmacy, check for a NAFDAC registration number on the pack, and where a pack has a scratch-off code, use it: NAFDAC’s verification scheme confirms by text message whether the pack is genuine.
Laboratories
Standalone diagnostic laboratories across the city will run blood tests, scans and other investigations, often without a referral. Your results are yours: keep copies and bring them to every appointment, because hospitals rarely share records with one another.
In an emergency
Call 767 or 112 for the Lagos State Ambulance Service. Ambulances are few and the traffic is what it is, so for many emergencies the fastest route is a car or taxi straight to the nearest hospital with an emergency unit.
The law: section 20 of the National Health Act 2014 says no health establishment may refuse a person emergency treatment for any reason, and the Compulsory Treatment and Care for Victims of Gunshots Act 2017 requires hospitals to treat gunshot victims at once, without waiting for a police report or a deposit.
The practice: hospitals still ask for a deposit before treating an emergency, and some still turn patients away. Go with someone who can argue and someone who can pay, and say clearly that it is an emergency.