Abuja – The National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) says it will partner stakeholders to revamp the country’s 10,000 Primary Health Care facilities before the end of this year.
The Acting Executive Secretary of the scheme, Mr Femi Akingbade, disclosed this in Abuja during a meeting with stakeholders.
The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the meeting has the theme “Understanding the Roles of Stakeholders in the Emerging NHIS”.
Akingbade said that the partnership was to strengthen the efforts being made by the Federal Government to ensure Universal Health Coverage.
He said that “strengthening the Primary Health Care (PHC) system will reduce the medical cases referred to secondary and tertiary health care facilities.
“If we have a very good primary health care system, we will cure 80 per cent of some diseases before they advance to a big case.
“In Nigeria, we have 9,432 political wards; we believe there should be at least one PHC facility in each of the wards.
“If there are private health care centres, we can work with them to build a standard, instead of duplicating centres.
“We are creating 10,000 health care facilities this year; we already have about 30,000 health care facilities.
“What we are doing is an intervention to make sure that 10,000 works in the first one year.”
Akingbade said that “strengthening of the PHC facilities will encourage proximity and boost the confidence of the enrollees in the health care system.
“We want to change the health care system, so that the first point of call for enrollees will be a PHC and not a tertiary centre.
“The tertiary health centres are over stretched; we have bombarded them with primary health care services that even, the human resource at those levels cannot cope with the crowd coming to them.
“If I say an enrollee should not go to National Hospital for antenatal, I should be able to provide an alternative for you to get good care at that level where it is easier and affordable.”
The acting executive secretary also said that the referral system needed to be organised.[pro_ad_display_adzone id=”70560″]
He said that there were some enrollees that would require advanced treatment in secondary and tertiary health care facilities.
He said that the process would be painstaking, but the roles of each system needed to be spelt out properly and as well generate revenues.
Akingbade said that the scheme would assist Health Maintenance Organisations and Health Care Facilities (HCF) access finance to boost their hospitals for the benefit of enrollees.
“For those that will need basic minimum financial support to be at par with the World Health Organisation’s standard, the NHIS will come in.
“We are talking to some development banks that will give facilities to these private investors at single digits and you are guaranteed that in that political ward, there will be health care facility,’’ he said.
Akingbade said that insurance to health was the key to sustainable health, but lack of confidence in the health care system had deterred enrollees. (NAN)