Adebayo Folorunsho-Francis
A Public Health Physician at Corona Management Systems, Dr. Chijoke Kaduru, has emphasised that several Primary Health Centres in Nigeria lack the capacity to effectively receive and manage funding.
He harped on the need to improve investments in available healthcare facilities across the country.
Kaduru raised these concerns at a stakeholders’ validation meeting on ‘Assessing Primary Healthcare in Nigeria through a State Scoring System’, held in Abuja on Thursday.
The meeting, aimed at evaluating the quality of PHCs in Nigeria to identify areas for improvement.
The physician noted that PHCs require support to enhance their capability to receive and manage funding.
The assessment programme, organised by Save the Children International in collaboration with One Campaign group and other stakeholders, revealed that a greater number of PHCs face challenges in managing funds and require assistance to improve on financial management capacity.
However, a concerned Kaduru insisted that the issue of accountability and community involvement in Nigeria’s healthcare cannot be overemphasised.
He said, “The key thing we realised in the course of the assessment was that the primary health facilities don’t have the capacity at the moment to receive and manage funding well enough. We have to find ways of supporting them better and also find ways to hold them accountable for it.
“The focus then for us is to generate intelligence that can support that process as much as possible. That way we can come back a year or two from now to say we did provide some intelligence to support the process and how well have we fared”
On his part, the Country Director of One Campaign, Stanley Achonu, explained that they assessed and evaluated various aspects of PHC facilities, including resources, financial and human resources, drug availability and patients’ experience to gather their data.
He assured that the findings would soon be made public to set a baseline for the government and influence policies.
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