The death of Nkanu Nnamdi at a Lagos hospital has shaken the country in a way few health stories ever do.
It has not done so because of the fame of his parents alone, but because it has touched something far deeper: a widespread and quietly held fear that many Nigerians carry into every clinic, every emergency room, every operating theatre—that when things go wrong, there is no system that reliably tells the truth, learns, and protects the next patient.
Part of the pain for me as a doctor is that any attempt to go beyond one case and contextualise its statistical significance within a system where several lives are saved for every mistake made will be seen as unhelpful defensiveness.
I will not go that way—I’d rather kindle a discussion that takes this tragedy as an opportunity for positive change.
Across social media, private conversations, and the press, Nigerians are recounting years of experiences in hospitals—some tragic, some merely annoying or dehumanizing, many deeply unsettling.
These stories were always there. What has changed is that one case, impossible to dismiss or bury, has given people the courage to speak.
In that sense, this moment feels like an inflection point. Most scandals fade. Inflection points do not.
This one has all the features of the latter: a dead child, a powerful, credible family, a private elite hospital, the globally high-risk domains of anaesthesia and procedural safety, a regulatory involvement, a massive public memory bank now unlocked.
Now, the question is not whether medicine in Nigeria has dedicated professionals—it does.
The question is whether we have built the systems that allow even good people to work safely, transparently, and accountably under pressure.
Modern medicine is extraordinarily powerful, but it is also inherently dangerous.
Sedation, anaesthesia, intravenous drugs, imaging, and invasive procedures save lives every day. But they also carry known risks.
That is why in every country with mature health systems, these activities are surrounded by something called clinical governance: a web of standards, training, monitoring, reporting, and independent oversight designed to make harm rare, visible, and preventable.
Clinical governance is not about blaming or punishing doctors. It encompasses frameworks for quality assurance, risk management, accountability, and continuous improvement in healthcare.
It is about designing care so that a single mistake, a tired clinician, a faulty or missing monitor, or a rushed decision does not become a fatal cascade.
Nigeria has fragments of this system. We have regulatory bodies, professional councils, hospital accreditation agencies, and national policies on quality of care.
What we do not yet have is a robust, routinely enforced culture of safety across both public and private healthcare. Too much depends on individual heroism. Too little depends on institutional reliability.
This is why the Euracare case matters beyond one family or one hospital.
It has exposed a deeper anxiety: that when something goes terribly wrong in a Nigerian hospital, patients and families often do not know whether it was unavoidable, unfortunate, or preventable—and they have no trusted mechanism to find out.
That uncertainty corrodes trust. And without trust, no health system can function.
This moment calls for something better than outrage on the part of the public or defensiveness on the part of clinicians. It calls for reform.
This is no longer about Euracare. It is about whether Nigerians will accept opaque, unaccountable healthcare as normal.
When stories start flowing at this scale, the system is being told something it can no longer ignore. That is what an inflection point looks like.
It is what health system analysts call a sentinel event cascade—a phenomenon characterised by the breaking of a trusted silence, the questioning of the legitimacy of institutions, and the shifting of moral authority from institutions to the public.
But mere public outcry cannot change things. We have to ride on this momentum to bring about enduring institutional change.
Nigeria needs to take clinical governance seriously as a national priority.
That means setting clear minimum safety standards for high-risk care like paediatric sedation and anaesthesia.
It means requiring hospitals—public and private—to have functioning systems for incident reporting, mortality review, and independent audit.
It means ensuring that when a child dies unexpectedly during a procedure, the response is not silence, speculation, or legal manoeuvring, but a transparent, expert, and credible investigation whose lessons are shared and acted upon.
It is heartwarming that the Nigerian Medical Association’s new strategic plan, set to be launched this month, rightly places clinical governance and accountability at the centre of the profession’s future.
This tragedy should be the pivot that turns that promise into action.
Professional bodies, regulators, hospitals, and civil society must work together to create a national culture where patient safety is measured, monitored, and enforced—not merely asserted.
Some countries built their modern safety systems after aircraft crashed.
Others after children died in hospitals. Those losses were not erased, but they were not wasted either.
They became the moment when societies decided that preventable harm was no longer acceptable.
I would like to believe that Nigeria stands at such a moment now.
We owe it to little Nkanu, and to the countless unnamed patients whose stories are only now being told, to build a healthcare system that does not rely on luck, silence, or status—but on standards, transparency, and care that is as safe as it is compassionate.
