Part of the new administration’s plan to boost health is to fix the bottlenecks around the health systems governance and empower health workers to produce the right services, Ali Pate, coordinating minister of Health and Social Welfare has revealed.
He said governance, people, population health outcomes, and health security are expedient to his ministry’s mandate to set the country’s health system on a trajectory to deliver efficient health services to Nigerians.
Pate who spoke during an interview with Channels TV on Monday said the administration will employ a whole government approach to ensure all levels of government contribute meaningfully to building a strong structure from primary health centres to general hospitals and teaching hospitals.
He added that private sector players in the industry will collaborate to form a team working towards the common health goal of Nigerians.
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“Human resources is the most important ingredient for producing health. The lifeblood of the health system is people. We have met with stakeholders to work as a team. Talents have to be trained, deployed, and returned and the quality of what they deliver ought to be improved. And hopefully, those who have gone away can begin to find their way back,” Pate said.
Some of the major issues facing Nigeria’s healthcare inadequate funding, inequality in access to care, weak primary healthcare system and high out-of-pocket spending.
Lack of funding has led to shortages of doctors, nurses, and other healthcare workers, as well as a lack of essential medical supplies and equipment.
The inequality in access to care has contributed to Nigeria’s high maternal and child mortality rates as many poor often have to rely on public hospitals that are understaffed and underfunded.
The Nigerian government has traditionally focused on providing tertiary care, such as hospital care, at the expense of primary care, such as preventive care and health education. This neglect of primary care has contributed to the spread of diseases such as malaria and HIV/AIDS.
Pate-led Ministry of Health is looking to ensure that all state governments and all local governments play their part, invest in infrastructure and equipment, and ensure the services delivered are of good standards.
“We have to improve the population health outcomes from primary healthcare centres in the realm of local governments to the tertiary hospitals under the federal government. They have to be run better. We have put our chief executive on notice that we want to know the quality of what is being delivered,” Pate said.
“We must also invest in detecting outbreaks, knowing when they occur, and responding to them before they get out of hand.”
According to him, Nigeria is undergoing a demographic transition with a population that is youthful but at the same time aging.
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The country is experiencing an epidemiological transition whereby the patterns of disease it has had for the last several decades are gradually giving way to some other new homes of diseases, he explained, noting that “non-communicable diseases are more prominent partly because of aging population and lifestyle changes.
In addition, Nigeria is also undergoing an economic transition from where it was a few decades ago to where it is now.
“Nutritionally even what we eat is gradually changing from traditional things to more processed foods. It is not just one bucket. It is a whole government approach, from finance, planning, health, and education,” he said.
“There is scope for significant improvement in terms of what we do in the health sector. At the core of it is people that work hard within the health sector. They will have to be appreciated with the limited financing.”
