By Oluwakemi Oladipo and Omowunmi Alake
Lagos – The Association of General and Private Medical Practitioners of Nigeria (AGPMPN) has called on the Federal Government to improve its annual budgetary allocation to the nation’s health sector for effective healthcare delivery.
The Chairman of the association, Dr Tunji Akintade, made the call in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on Thursday in Lagos.
Akintade said the improvement should be in line with the World Health Organisation (WHO)’s standard and the African Union countries declaration.
NAN recalls that in April 2001, the African Union countries met in Abuja and pledged to set a target of allocating at least 15 per cent of their annual budget to improve the health sector.
They also urged donor countries to scale up support. Years later, only one African country reached this target.
Twenty-six countries had increased the proportion of government expenditures allocated to health and 11 had reduced it. In the remaining nine countries there was no obvious trend up or down.
Also, a total expenditure of N340.456bn was budget for the Federal Ministry of Health (FMOH) in 2018.
This represents a nominal increase of 10 per cent above the 2017 budget and overall four per cent of the 2018 budget.
Within the overall Federal Ministry of Health budget, the recurrent budget increased by 6 per cent from N253.8bn to N269.3bn, this amounts to N16.5bn in nominal terms.
Akintade said that increased budgetary allocation to the sector would address the issues of delay salaries, non-payment of allowances, inadequate facilities, poor working environment, among others.
“At least, 15 per cent of annual budget should be allocated to the health sector, while the World Health Organisation (WHO) recommended 13 per cent.
“Other developed and developing countries have a health budget of over 15 per cent; we can achieve this by engaging all health professionals, including private practitioners.
“Active engagement of private health practitioners will improve provision of effective healthcare system to the people and also boost the health sector’s economy,’’ he said.
According to him, our partnership with government and development partners will improve the areas of family health and nutrition, infection and disease control, reduction of maternal and infant mortality, among others.
“The nation’s health sector has been carrying its cross of bad health indices in Nigeria like the case of husband and wife bonded by oath,” Akintade said.
He said that the responsibilities of improving these indices was in the hands of professional health providers, governments and the health seekers.
“The association is ready to start the year with health quality assurance and improvement in providing health services to the people.
“The main reason we queue up continuous relevant professional development programmes for our teaming members is to keep pace with the international standard.
“We cannot afford to run parallel sector in this country because this is where the health problems starts from; specifically, we demand inclusive health management of Lagos citizens by the private sector.
“We do not only provide the labour force for doctors, nurses, laboratory scientists, hospital assistants and aides, securities and so, but we are the major stakeholders in reducing health indices,” Akintade said.
On levies for private health providers, he called on the Lagos State Government to come up with special tax to reduce health burden of special rate for infrastructure and good road network.
“This will help the nation’s health system to be functional and not a structural system alone.
“The private health providers’ board, under the Lagos State Ministry of Health (LMoH) is long overdue to get involved in health development.
“This is for the purpose of health development and also a well-deserved link that can address all the health issues in the state,” he said.