Chief Medical Director of University of Ilorin Teaching Hospital (UITH) Abdulwaheed Latinwo, has said that no fewer than 3,000 Nigerians go for medical treatment in India alone every month.

Speaking in Ilorin recently, Olatinwo said the medical trips had cost the country millions of naira in capital flight.

He said that heart-related diseases were the most common reason the people sought medical care abroad and called for concerted efforts towards encouraging treatment of the diseases and other ailments within the country.

The UITH boss noted that heart disease currently accounted for about 30 per cent of global disease mortality and about 47 per cent of deaths from non-communicable diseases.

He said congenital heart disease accounted for many of the deaths in the developing world and that they have been associated with a lot of avoidable human suffering.

He expressed hope that the conference whose theme is "Congenital Heart Disease" and sub themed "Capacity Building in the Practice of Cardiovascular Surgery and Medicine," will propose innovative solutions to elevate the quality of cardiovascular care available in the country to what obtained in the developed world.

Olatinwo said that the UITH, under his administration, was aggressively pursuing an agenda of ensuring a total quality healthcare that guarantees patient's satisfaction.

He said the hospital was investing heavily on the construction of a cardiac catheterization laboratory.

Also speaking, a cardiovascular surgeon, Peter Adeoye, said Nigeria was lagging extremely in the open heart surgery as against the situation in other parts of the world.

"In deed, other African countries have progressed in this regard. South Africa with population of about 50 million people has at least five standard cardiac centres serving the Western Cope region alone. Nigeria, with over 150 million people barely has one.

Ivory Coast has at least two; Kenya has five centres in Nairobi performing an average of 150 open heart surgeries per year in each centre. Ghana and Sudan have at least a centre each also with similar volume of cases as in Kenya," he stated.