Only 463 of Nigeria’s 25,843 PHCs have skilled birth attendants — FG
The National Primary Health Care Development Agency, NPHCDC, has said that only 463 of Nigeria’s 25,843 primary healthcare facilities have the required skilled birth attendants.
This means that 25,380 primary health care centres across the country have no skilled birth attendants, leaving residents of communities where they are located, especially women to their fate.
The Executive Director of NPHCDC, Dr Faisal Shuaib, disclosed this on Wednesday at a media briefing on the official launch of the Community Based Health Research, Innovative Training and Services Programme, CRISP, in Abuja.
Besides, he said there was the problem of unequal distribution of available skilled birth attendants in the primary health care facilities.
To address the ugly development, he said: “The National Primary Health Care Development Agency has come up with an innovation called Community-based Health Research, Innovative-training and Services Program (CRISP), which we will be launched on Monday the 22nd of May 2023 at the Banquet Hall of the State House.”
Speaking on the efforts of the agency towards addressing the issues affecting primary health care delivery in Nigeria, particularly the issue of inadequate human resources for health, he recalled that his organisation in 2019, declared a state of emergency on the number of mothers and children dying every day in Nigeria, by setting up a national coordination centre known as National Emergency Maternal and Child Health Intervention Centre, NEMCHIC, to provide oversight on reproductive, maternal, newborn, child and adolescent health plus nutrition in Nigeria.
“Through this centre, our agency has conceived and has been coordinating a set of related high-impact interventions nationwide to reduce preventable maternal and under-5 mortalities across the country.
“One of such interventions has to do with the provision of skilled health workers in our PHC facilities. The availability of skilled health workers in our PHC facilities is critical to curbing maternal, perinatal, and neonatal morbidity and mortality.
“In pursuit of this and other goals for advancing primary health care in the country, you may recall that the Federal Ministry of Health in collaboration with NPHCDA held a well-publicized Primary Health Care summit in March 2022, during which we presented a 4-point agenda for PHC re-imagining.
” As part of this agenda, we discussed the need to close the gaps in the adequacy and distribution of human resources for health at the primary healthcare level.
He explained that CRISP is a partnership between Teaching Hospitals, Federal Medical Centres, National Primary Health Care Development Agency, State Primary Health Care Boards, Local Government Health Authorities and the communities to support primary health care development.”
“The intervention specifically focuses on increasing, retaining and improving the quality, adequacy, competency, and distribution of a committed multidisciplinary primary health care workforce that includes facility outreach and community-based health workers supported through effective management supervision and appropriate compensation.
CRISP aims to leverage the rural posting of Resident Doctors from teaching hospitals to boost and guarantee the quality of care at the PHC level through their active involvement in primary health service delivery. This is targeted at improving Reproductive, Maternal, Newborn, Child and Adolescent Health, amongst other health services within the benefiting communities,” he further explained.
