An Health expert on Wednesday emphasised the need to have a better investment from state governments in order to improve health sector across the country .
The public health physician at Corona Management Systems, Dr Chidjoke Kadiru, said the investment plan and the sector-wide approach will help the country in going forward.
He said one of the key things that they realised at the Primary Health Care Assessment/Highlight Trends and insight is that, the public primary health facilities do not have the capabilities at the moment to receive and manage funding well enough.
He said they have to find ways of supporting them do better and also find ways to hold them accountable for it.
He said they also have to improve on how our communities are getting involved in the primary health care system adding that ultimately, a great idea still needs to be implemented and hopefully, we can do that together.
According to him, the reality of the conversation is that no matter how beautiful the infrastructure and the structures are, if the workers are not there to give people the services, we will still be missing alot.
“We have to improve the infrastructure. Things like portable water, sleeping quarters, electricity in the health facility, those things are bare minimum.
“They also need refrigerators to store some of the drugs that need to stay within the coaching time, but these refrigerators are used for other vaccines which shouldn’t be so. We need to find ways to store those drugs, so that it can stay potent and useful for people.
On digital health , he said health care worker don’t generally have support for internet in reporting. “So, even if we want to deploy electronic medical records or telemedicine what is currently there in the facility does not represent the capacity that they can use.
“There is need for the internet infrastructure, training and building capacity for the people in the facility to report,” he said .
Also, the Country Director of One campaign, Stanley Achono said they have gathered datas, looked at reporting in terms of vaccination, in terms of nutrition for child care and the findings reflect the work that some of the partners do on the field around health insurance, coverage and all of those things.
He said their next step is to begin to share their findings with government to finalise the report and hopefully in the next few weeks, the report will be made public.
He said the details of the findings will be made public adding that their aim for doing this is to set the baseline for the government to see, so that in future when they do this assessment, they can say there has been improvement based on the new policies put in place by the current government.
