Recent findings show that the challenges that limit the effective delivery of primary health care (PHC) services in Nigeria still exist.
It is understood that most of the PHC facilities, located in rural areas, lack the capacity to provide essential health-care services due to issues tied to poor staffing, inadequate equipment, and poor funding.
Data from the World Bank shows that about 48.04 percent of Nigeria’s population live in rural areas, where poverty is more predominant, thus limiting access to quality health care.
The country’s Minister of State for Health, Olorunnimbe Mamora, at a public hearing organised by the House of Representatives Committee on Health Institution, said that less than one-third of the 30,000 primary health care centres in the countries were functioning optimally.
‘A number of the existing health facilities and institutions are groaning under the pains of inadequate funding. Whether federal medical centres, whether they are teaching hospitals, even at the primary health centre level in the communities’, he said.
‘It would interest you to know that at the last audit that the ministry of health carried out, out of about 30,000 primary health centres in that audit report, we have less than one-third that is functional and even those ones are not fully functional because the functionality is not determined by the building, the physical structure’.
The outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic has further exposed the devastating gaps in the country’s health care system, with Connected Development (CODE) revealing another worrying finding.
‘During the course of our tracking and evaluation, we discovered that 80 percent of PHCs fall below the minimum standard of the NPHCDA and were incapable of storing or administering Covid-19 vaccines’, the Chief Executive of CODE, Hamzat Lawal, told Development Diaries.
CODE, using its ‘FollowTheMoney’ accountability tool, tracked 90 PHCs in 15 states of the federation, according to Lawal.
Africa’s most populous nation failed for the umpteenth time to meet the Abuja Declaration by African leaders in 2001 and the World Health Organisation (WHO) to allocate, at least, 15 percent of yearly national budgets to health.
The federal government allocated N724 billion to the health sector, representing 4.2 percent of the N17.16 trillion budget for 2022.
In his reaction to the recent budget for health, Lawal said, ‘Getting more funding directed to improving the healthcare sector is counterproductive when we have not institutionalised accountability and openness.
‘So I will say let us build strong institutions that will guarantee that when more funding is provided, there are no leakages that will create another complication or send us back right where we started’.
The NPHCDA recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with CODE to strengthen and foster health sector accountability in Nigeria, and Lawal explained to Development Diaries how this partnership will impact the nation’s health care service delivery.
‘The partnership is a vital step towards enabling CODE to further expand its tracking and evaluation of primary healthcare centres (PHCs) across the country and this will help to inform its advocacy in canvassing for improved primary health care infrastructure and service delivery’, he added.
‘The first step towards achieving a better health care system in Africa is to identify and proffer solutions to the gaps that currently exist within the system. Our goal is to also promote openness, transparency in the health sector generally’.
The Executive Director of the NPHCDA, Dr Faisal Shuaib, who commended the step being taken by CODE, said, ‘We welcome this collaboration because it is also an opportunity to hear from the people we serve. It is an opportunity to get feedback on the services that will deliver’.
The NPHCDA boss, who revealed that more than 70 percent of PHCs across the country do not have the right infrastructure and right drugs, said that the collaboration will provide an opportunity for civil society organisations (CSOs) to work towards strengthening PHCs in Nigeria.
Photo source: UNICEF
