The Minister of Health, Prof. Isaac Adewole, has renewed the Federal Government’s commitment to make sure there were functional Primary Health Care (PHC) centres in each political ward across the country.
The minister made this known during the sensitisation workshop on immunisation and PHC organized by the National Primary Health Care Development Agency (NPHCDA) on Monday in Abuja.
The workshop was organised to reach out to civil servants, to enable them champion the demand for routine immunisation and PHC services across the country.
Adewole said there are no less than 30,000 primary health care facilities in Nigeria but only 20 per cent of the Primary Health Care Centres (PHCs) are functional.
He added that the government’s decision was to keep revitalizing the PHC in Nigeria as resources became available, stressing that PHC was a facility that was closer to people.
“We do not want to create new ones, what we need is to make the existing ones work, some of them are covered by bushes while some don’t have water, electricity or human resources.
“Our job is to put them there and make the PHCs functional gradually, so that we can reverse the pyramid of the health system,’’ the minister said.
Adewole noted that Nigeria was not doing well with immunization, when you look across the country, only one out of four children has received full dosage of the immunization package.
He said when you look across states only one state scored up to 80 per cent of routine immunization coverage, while some are less than 10 per cent.
He said the participants had the duty to prevent children from dying, ensure that the children remained healthy and change the narrative of immunization in Nigeria.
“I am quite optimistic that this will be the beginning of a new era of vaccination in Nigeria,’’.
The minister said that the initiative was essential and it was a mark of recognition of the importance of civil servants in the society.
He added that civil servants were the engine room, without them nothing works in the society.
“if you don’t work and leave a legacy, ignore civil servants, they represent a memory and even when you are gone they are there,’’ he said.
Earlier, Dr Faisal Shuaib, Executive Director NPHCDA, said the workshop was to reach out to civil servants to champion the demand for routine immunization and PHC services across the country.
He added that there was no other set of people who were as educated and influential in the community as the civil servants.
“For many years only folks in NPHCDA and Federal Ministry of Health had been talking about immunisation and PHC.
“ What we are saying in essence is that PHC and routine immunisation required inter-ministerial collaboration to ensure that we are successful.
“Everybody should go back to his ministry and community to ensure that women and children are immunised against vaccine preventable diseases,’’ he said.
He said the agency took a step to ensure that more people were engaged, to create more demand for routine immunization and other primary health care services.
“We expect that the civil servants will go back to their respective ministries and pass on the message to their colleagues.
“Apart from that, when they go to their communities they also go with a check list so that they can give us a good feedback on PHC services,’’ he said.
While responding to questions on the impact of the Joint Health Sector Unions (JOHESU) strike on preventing eligible children from accessing vaccination, the Executive Director said the agency was very worried about the strike.
Shuaib, however, expressed optimism that the strike would be called off sooner than later.
