A Health expert has declared that Primary Health Centres (PHC) do not have the capacity to receive and manage funding well enough. This is even as he called for the need to improve investment in PHCs across Nigeria.
Dr. Chidjoke Kaduru, Public Health Physician at Corona Management Systems (CNS), disclosed this at a Stakeholders Validation Meeting on Assessing the Primary Healthcare system in Nigeria through a State Scoring System in Abuja. The meeting organised in collaboration with Save the Children International (SCI) was aimed at looking at the quality of PHCs in Nigeria and to seek ways for possible improvement.
Kaduru said the One Campaign group and other stakeholders came together to do the scorecard assessment around 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.
“The key things that realised at the course of the assessment was that the primary health facilities did not have the capability at the moment to receive and manage funding well enough.
“We have to find ways of supporting them better around that 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 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?”
While calling for the need to improve the involvement of commumitee within the primary health care system for accountability, he noted that at the moment it is lacking.
PHCs not ready for Technology
The health experts also pointed out that at the moment , primary health care facilities do not show any capabilities to take on technology and use it well.
“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 of the conversation 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 you know a lot.”
Health Experts assessment of PHC facilities for data collation
Nigeria Country Director of One Campaign, Stanley Achonu said PHC facilities, resources, both financial and human resources, drugs, availability, conditions, user experience among others were assessed to gather data. He said the details of the findings would be made public adding that objective is to set the baseline for the government and to influence policies.
