By Doosuur Iwambe
Nigeria loses 2,500 children under the age of 5 everyday due to largely preventable causes, including the lack of services that skilled birth attendants could provide, Vice President, Prof. Yemi Osinbajo has said.
According to the vice president, Nigeria makes up only 2 percent of the world population but accounts for 14 percent of the world’s maternal death burden.
He made this disclosure in his keynote address titled: ‘Accelerating human capital development through health workforce investment’.
Represented by the Minister of Women’s Affairs, Mrs Pauline Tallen, Osibanjo noted that about 80 percent of these death burdens occur in the primary health care and community level.
He lamented that the development clearly justifies the need for urgent actions to be taken to implement the CRISP to address this situation.
“Similarly, our country loses 2,500 children under the age of 5 everyday due to largely preventable causes, including the lack of services that skilled birth attendants could provide.”
He said there is not a single country in the world that can boast of effective health care delivery without adequate and well distributed human resource for health.
“No matter how much of a masterpiece the architecture of a health facility is, or how sophisticated the equipment are, or even the availability of the commodities, a health care delivery system will not function optimally if there are not enough skilled workers”.
He therefore said, there is no better way to tackle the challenges of health care delivery in Nigeria than to close the gaps on the equitable availability of skilled health workers in Nigeria PHC facilities.
“This can be achieved by a creative measure such as the CRISP this is the Community-based health Research, Innovative Training and Services Programme”.
“I can confidently tell you that President Muhammadu Buhari and I are ever passionate about interventions that would help to improve the health and wellbeing of the Nigerian people, and I have no doubt in the capacity of Dr Faisal and his team working in partnership with the academia and teaching hospital will implement and get the desired result from this initiative”.
“This initiative will not only make skilled health workers from our teaching hospitals and federal medical centres available to offer services in our primary health care centres in all states of the federation but will also be leveraged to ensure capacity transfer to, and mentorship of PHC workers as well as promotion of best practices in community health.”, he said.
Also, the Minister of Health, Dr Osagie Ehanire in his address also said, Nigeria is facing the challenges of gross inadequacy and inequity in the availability of human resource for health, especially skilled birth attendants (Doctors, nurses, midwives, and Community Health Extension Workers (CHEWs)) trained on Modified Life Saving Skills across our primary health care facilities.
Ehanire also lamented that working in primary health care centres have remain unattractive to most of Nigerian skilled workers who prefer to provide services in the urban settings.
According to Ehanire, “Aside from the problems of gross inadequacy and inequitable distribution of our skilled health care workers, we are also facing the problem of their detrition from the PHC facilities.
“With this kind of situation, no matter how much you invest in building and equipping a health care facility, if there are no skilled workers to provide the needed services, it is as good as there are no health care services for the people”.
He however disclosed that, the federal government, in March 2022, on the initiative of the National Primary Health Care Development Agency, had a summit on re-imagining PHC in Nigeria during which the ministry presented a 4-point agenda for PHC transformation.
“The first agendum focuses on improving access to service delivery through PHC revitalization. One of the strategic pillars for achieving this is ensuring the adequacy, competency, and distribution of a committed multidisciplinary primary health care workforce supported through effective management, supervision within an enabling environment.”
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Ehanire therefore said the CRISP initiative launched today is one of government programmatic ways of achieving the first of interrelated 4-point agenda on PHC transformation in Nigeria.
“The initiative will leverage our teaching hospitals and federal medical centres in all the states of the federation to pull together skilled health care workers to the primary health care centres in our communities where they will routinely provide services and mentorship, as well as build the capacity of the PHC workers.”
“CRISP has been carefully conceptualized and designed in ways that would be helpful towards the realisation of government’s vision of Universal Health Coverage”, he explained.
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