30m Nigerians now have access to quality health services, says NPHCDA

THE National Primary Health Care Development Agency, NPHCDA,has said about 30 million Nigerians now have access to quality health services.

The Executive Director of the agency,Dr Faisal Shuaib,who stated this, Wednesday,at the Nigeria State Health Investment Project,NSHIP Closure Workshop,in Abuja, tasked stakeholders at the event to come up with strong recommendations for strengthening primary health care delivery in the country.

He, however, regretted that the “health outcomes have remained suboptimal in Nigeria despite many years of relatively increasing investments in the Nigerian health system through input financing.”

Noting that the NSHIP project of the federal government has brought total turnaround of the country’ health sector,he claimed:”This transformation has ensured that about 30 million Nigerians, including women and children, have access to quality basic health services and secondary services for continuum of care.”

Shuaib said,”As part of the Federal Government’s effort to improve access to quality health care for Nigerians, the National Primary Health Care Development Agency (NPHCDA) commenced the pre-pilot of output-based financing in 2011 under the Nigeria State Health Investment Project (NSHIP) using the experiences from Rwanda, Haiti, Cambodia etc in three local government areas” in the country

The council areas,he said were Fufore, in Adamawa,Wamba  in Nasarawa and Ondo-East in Ondo states, respectively.

According to him,the “initial tremendous results shown in the pre-pilot LGAs informed the government’s commitment of USD 171.5 million and USD 145 million (credit/grant from the World Bank) for the scaled up of result-based financing (RBF) to the remaining 49 LGAs across Adamawa, Nasarawa and Ondo states as well as extension to 64 LGAs in the remaining five North East states of Bauchi, Borno, Gombe, Taraba and Yobe.”

” This was to rapidly rehabilitate and re-establish health care service delivery as a result of the devastating effect of the insurgency in the area,”he explained.

“The implementation of NSHIP was also in line with Federal Government’s Primary Health Care (PHC) revitalization agenda and the initiative of the provision of, at least, one functional PHC per ward across the country in order to attain Universal Health Coverage (UHC) under the President Muhammadu Buhari’s agenda for the health sector.

“The implementation of NSHIP brought about the paradigm shift from the traditional input-based financing, fragmented and unclear accountability, top-bottom investment approach, no verification and centralized medicine supply to the result-based financing with well-defined and monitored performance indicators, accountability, bottom-up investment decisions, rigorous verification and decentralized medicine and health commodities supply within the PHC landscape,”he added.

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