By Kazeem Akolawole
The Vice President, Prof. Yemi Osinbajo has disclosed that Nigeria loses 2,500 children under the age of 5 every day due to largely preventable causes, including the lack of services that skilled birth attendants could provide.
Osinbajo while stating this in his keynote address titled: ‘Accelerating human capital development through health workforce investment’ said Nigeria makes up only 2 percent of the world population but accounts for 14 percent of the world’s maternal death burden.
He further noted that 80 percent of these death burdens occur at the primary healthcare and community levels and stressed that this justifies the need for urgent actions to be taken to implement the CRISP to address this situation.
He said there is not a single country in the world that can boast of effective healthcare delivery without adequate and well-distributed human resources for health.
“No matter how much of a masterpiece the architecture of a health facility is, or how sophisticated the equipment is, or even the availability of the commodities, a health care delivery system will not function optimally if there are not enough skilled workers. There is no better way to tackle the challenges of healthcare delivery in Nigeria than to close the gaps in the equitable availability of skilled health workers in Nigeria’s PHC facilities.
“This can be achieved by a creative measure such as the CRISP which is the Community-based Health Research, Innovative Training and Services Programme.
“I can confidently tell you that President Muhammadu Buhari and I are ever passionate about interventions that would help to improve the health and wellbeing of the Nigerian people, and I have no doubt in the capacity of Dr. Faisal and his team working in partnership with the academia and teaching hospital will implement and get the desired result from this initiative,” he said.
The Minister of Health, Dr. Osagie Ehanire said, Nigeria is facing the challenges of gross inadequacy and inequity in the availability of the human resource for health, especially skilled birth attendants (Doctors, nurses, midwives, and Community Health Extension Workers (CHEWs)) trained on Modified Life-Saving Skills across our primary health care facilities.
Ehanire lamented that working in primary healthcare centers has remained unattractive to most Nigerian skilled workers who prefer to provide services in urban settings.
He said: “Aside from the problems of gross inadequacy and inequitable distribution of our skilled health care workers, we are also facing the problem of their detrition from the PHC facilities.
“With this kind of situation, no matter how much you invest in building and equipping a health care facility, if there are no skilled workers to provide the needed services, it is as good as there are no health care services for the over”.
