As part of the measures put in place to improve healthcare delivery and bring healthcare services closer to the people, Enugu state Government is currently building new 260 type Two Primary Healthcare centres across the state.
This was made known by the Governor, Dr. Peter Mbah, Wednesday, when he received in audience the Minister of State for Health, Dr. Tunji Alausa , who paid him a courtesy visit in Government , Enugu.
He commended the Federal Government for it’s support to the state Government, saying , the state government has taken some steps in improving the healthcare sector.
“We are doing some aggressive things also in collaboration with the federal government. We are currently constructing brand new 260 Type two primary healthcare centres.
“We have also robust and developmental plan to address the issues of fees. As we are dealing with the infrastructural deficit that we have identified, we also know that we have the same deficit in manpower .
Governor Mbah lamented the mass exodus of medical personnel in the country, saying, “it is really a challenge, this jappa syndrome. I don’t think there is anywhere, any sector that has suffered the most as the medical sector in terms of the migration syndrome. So,am glad that the Federal Government is rising to the occasion, they are taking steps to ensure that we raise more medical professionals.
Speaking on the Universal healthcare Coverage, Governor Mbah said, “that is an area we have been working with the federal government to ensure that , even before the enactment of National Health Insurance Act, we already have our own state health insurance Act,. We started Implementation of Universal healthcare Coverage.and that is still in progress. Our aim is to ensure that everybody here in Enugu has access.,’
He commended the Registrar of the Federal School of Dental Technology Enugu for his achievements, saying, ” that is essentially what we need when we delegate, Am quite pleased that he performed optimally , even above expectation, getting the school to be a degree awarding institution am so happy that he worked.
Earlier, the minister told the Governor that he was in Enugu to witness the graduation of Federal School of Dental technolgy ,Enugu.
He said, “the school collaborated with the federal University of technology Owerri, it’s now a degree awarding institution.. Today they have over 2000 students in that school.. they will be graduating abiut 300 students on Thursday. Besides that, they had built a lot of capacity, ” it’s actually the model we are using for all our other Institutions. and we are also doing that.We did a lot of diagnosis to know what were needed to be done.
” Now, when we got in here , we did our diagnosis ,we got a lot of review, we got International consultants come in and we talked with the entire staff of the federal ministry,. We got in all the medical directors , we talked, we looked at the challenges to know what we want to accomplish . We came up with four pillars of how we will proceed .
The ministet said the four pillars are the healthcare governance, which had to do with improving the healthcare governance.
We have a national health Act that was past in 2014 that actually has a lot of things to recover our healthcare system, it has not been implemented..
“Now, we are training almost One hundred and twenty thousand(120,000) community health workers across the country.. You will be distturbed that the protocol they are using to treat malaria,they used to treat diarrhea were the things they developed Twelve years ago, it has not been upgraded, so, ,we are going to upgrade that as well. So, our first pillar is improving governance , second pillar is improving our population healthcare cost by improving our healthcare system and we have actually met 75% in the country.
” What we have to do is to improve the infrastructure to get better equipment in the hospital. The third pillar is unlocking the value chain.
The fourth pillar, is security. The minister said thath beyond physical security, there should be heath security. “
He lamented mass movement of Nigeria’ns abroad, saying “People are leaving the country. We have to.leverage our population. .
He said that they have mandated all their training institutions to double the number students they are going to admit next academic year.
” We currently put it at five thousand doctors and dentists a year, by next year we will have almost about ten thousand students that enroled. We are not only doing that in medicine, we are doing that in Pharmacy, nursing. Right now, we are training about twenty six thousand nurses ,vnext year we will train about sixty thousand nurses across the country We have about
Tunji Alausa said by next year they will be graduating about sixty thousand nurses He added that they have asked the Medical council to double the squad for house officers . They have about 120 house officers now, they can train about 240 house officers, so ,we are doing a lot things at the health sector.We are happy to be here.
“Whatever you think we can do for you as a state at the national level it’s also part of out agenda, , better collaboration, better coordination of resources,” he said.
Author Maureen Ikpeama