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Experts have canvassed for increased investment and digitisation of Primary Healthcare Centres for quality service delivery across the country.
The call was made by the Public Health Physician at Corona Management Systems Dr Chidjoke Kaduru, at a Stakeholders’ Validation Meeting on Assessing the Primary Healthcare in Nigeria through a State Scoring System in Abuja.
The meeting organised in collaboration with Save the Children International aims to look at the quality of PHCs in Nigeria and seek ways for possible improvement.
Kaduru explained that stakeholders came together to carry out scorecard assessment of primary health care systems and their capacity to deliver services.
According to him, the objective of the assessment is to bring to limelight issues around PHC for the new administration that has shown keen interest in delivering an improved PHC system to navigate the system.
He said, “The focus then for us, is to generate intelligence that can support that process as much as possible.
“That way, we can also come back a year or two from now to say well we did provide some intelligence to support the process but how well have we fared ?”
Kaduru noted that the key things realized during the assessment were that the primary health facilities did not have the capability to receive and manage funding.
He added, “We have to find ways of supporting them better around that and also find ways to hold them accountable for it.”
The public health physician said there was a need to improve the involvement of communities with the primary health care system for accountability because, at the moment, that is lacking.
According to him, at the moment, the primary healthcare facilities have not shown capabilities to take on technology and use it well.
He said, “So we have to build from the ground up, not just do on the surface things to say we are using technology.
” Otherwise, we will not reap the benefits of the technology age you know for our health system. We also have to find ways of improving the community health worker landscape.
“The reality is that no matter how beautiful the infrastructure and the structures are, if the workers are not there to give people the services, we will still be missing a lot.”
Kaduru said that there was a need to improve infrastructure, like potable water, sleeping quarters and electricity in the health facility, adding that those things are the barest minimum, and there is also the need to put in refrigerators to store some of the drugs in the cold chain.
He called for better investment from state governments to improve health and a deliberate digital health plan.
Also speaking, Nigeria Country Director of One Campaign, Stanley Achonu, said members of the campaign visited three facilities in each senatorial district to carry out assessments.
He said the next step is to finalise the report, share findings with the government and make the findings public so as to set the baseline for the government and to influence policies.
(NAN)
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