Practical approach for health workers introduced to Nigerians

Lead Consultant and senior fellow in clinical governance and patient safety, Professor Joseph Ana, has presented a Practical Approach to Care Kit (PACK) to Nigerians. The PACK is guidelines designed for primary health care workers.

Addressing a press conference in Calabar, the Cross-River state capital, Prof Ana said that in 2011 the World Bank did a service delivery indicator survey in a number of African countries, including Nigeria, and they looked principally at the diagnostic accuracy rates.

According to him, it was discovered that health worker in primary health care in any of these countries make an incorrect diagnostic and often the treatment delivered to the patience was the incorrect.

“We didn’t do so well to address those challenges, to increase the clinical competence of our primary health care workers and to ensure that, when a patience visit a primary health care centre the diagnostic that is made is correct and that the treatment he receive was correct.

“The National Primary Health Care Agency in conjunction with the World Bank in Nigeria introduce a program and that program was to make it happened, PACK, Practical Approach to Care Kit was brought into Nigeria to help Nigerian achieve that objectives and we are proud to say that we are leading the pilot and the pilot comes in various stages.”

Prof Ana further said that the Africa Centre for Clinical Governance Research and Patient Safety first, provide guidelines that is working because nobody, no health worker whether in primary, secondary and tertiary health facilities can have all the information that is necessary from the day to day in their heads because there is so much information in health care that they need some guide and references.

“No matter how senior you are, no matter how qualified you are, no matter how specialists or generalists you are, you need some guidelines that you can make reference and the guidelines piloted in Nigeria are the PACK. You need to read the guidelines in the PACK”. The PACK was originally produced in South Africa and is currently in use in Malawi, Bostwana, Kenya, and Brazil. A few other countries like Nigeria are keying into it because it has transform countries where it has been established.

He explained that when the document was brought into Nigeria the agency spent most of last year to domesticated it, looking at Nigeria way of practicing medicine, looking at the guidelines that we used and the need to use PACK to address the challenges the Nigeria health care faces.

It is a guideline that integrated every clinical health worker in the primary health centre. “A Junior Community Health Worker (JCHEW), Community Health Extension Worker (CHEW), Community Health Officer (CHO), Nurses, Midwives and finally the medical Doctors make use of it and that is why it is integrated whereas in the past, we had different guidelines for different cadre.”

PACK is integrated and everybody work with PACK. PACK encourages team work, every other person is involved from security, clinician, pharmacist, lab scientist etc everybody has his or her contribution and the patience is in the middle, he stated.