A NEW Health Policy that would restructure the building blocks of the nation’s health sector is underway even as plans for the establishment of a Bank of Health is in the pipeline.
Disclosing this in Lagos, the Minister of Health, Prof. Isaac Adewole explained that although the country has had two previous sets of health polices since 1988, the new policy would reset the image, consciousness and the mindset of people about the health sector.
He said the new Policy would accelerate the social economic development of Nigeria. “The only reason why we are using that is to illustrate the role health can play in promoting social economic development. Over the years, no one has talked about health as a contributor to economic development, but we know many countries that have attained improvement in healthcare or achieved improvement in health development.
Further, Adewole noted that health is now being considered as an important tool for social economic development, adding that the new health policy will help drive the development.
He said the new health policy was approved at the emergency National Council of Health, NCH, last September ‘and once it has been edited it will be sent to Federal Executive Council for approval. That will be the third policy.
In the policy, essential things such as prevention of maternal death in the process of giving birth, immunisation for the children and tackling public health emergencies are taken care of.
“We are putting life into the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control, NCDC. We are putting life into polio even though we had four cases of polio and we are happy that as we move on Nigeria will be free of polio and Africa in 2017.
“We therefore conceived the Rapid Result Initiative, RRI. We gave a caption “better health for all Nigerians” and when you talk about providing access to people within five kilometres radius, you are talking about Universal Health Coverage”
Continuing, he recalled that in the last one year, the health sector was faced with so many challenges raging from Lassa fever to emergence of polio virus.
“Shortly after we came on board, we were faced with Lassa fever. We thought we should look at the performance of the health sector. The health indicators were such that no one was happy. Maternal mortality was like what you find in war-torn countries, child mortality was very bad. Malaria very bad; HIV was a problem.
While trying to look at the various indicators, we also stumbled on something that was particularly challenging. The healthcare indicators for wealthy Nigerians is like what you find in Europe and USA but looking at the immunisation coverage for poor people, antenatal coverage, skilled birth attendants for the poor, contraceptive usage, etc., is poor.”
Credit: NigeriaToday