30M Nigerians Now Have Access To Quality Health Services – NPHCDA

The National Primary Health Care Development Agency, NPHCDA has come out to say that about thirty million Nigerians now have access to quality health services.

The Executive Director of the agency, Dr Faisal Shuaib recently revealed this at the Nigeria State Health Investment Project, NSHIP Closure Workshop, in Abuja,

According to Faisal, stakeholders should come up with strong recommendations for strengthening primary health care delivery in the country, because that will help our dear country.

He added that it is sad to see how health outcomes have remained suboptimal in Nigeria despite many years of relatively increasing investments in the Nigerian health system via input financing.

His words, “As part of the Federal Government’s effort to improve access to quality health care for Nigerians, the National Primary Health Care Development Agency (NPHCDA) commenced the pre-pilot of output-based financing in 2011 under the Nigeria State Health Investment Project (NSHIP) using the experiences from Rwanda, Haiti, Cambodia etc in three local government areas.”

“The initial tremendous results shown in the pre-pilot LGAs informed the government’s commitment of USD 171.5 million and USD 145 million (credit/grant from the World Bank) for the scaled up of result-based financing (RBF) to the remaining 49 LGAs across Adamawa, Nasarawa and Ondo states as well as extension to 64 LGAs in the remaining five North East states of Bauchi, Borno, Gombe, Taraba and Yobe.”

“This was to rapidly rehabilitate and re-establish health care service delivery as a result of the devastating effect of the insurgency in the area.”

“The implementation of NSHIP was also in line with Federal Government’s Primary Health Care (PHC) revitalization agenda and the initiative of the provision of, at least, one functional PHC per ward across the country in order to attain Universal Health Coverage (UHC) under the President Muhammadu Buhari’s agenda for the health sector.”

“The implementation of NSHIP brought about the paradigm shift from the traditional input-based financing, fragmented and unclear accountability, top-bottom investment approach, no verification and centralized medicine supply to the result-based financing with well-defined and monitored performance indicators, accountability, bottom-up investment decisions, rigorous verification and decentralized medicine and health commodities supply within the PHC landscape.”