By Kazeem Akolawole
The National Health Insurance Authority (NHIA) has sensitised Ministry, Departments, and Agencies desk officers to, in turn, educate enrollees in their various domains on the new activities in the agency, particularly cancer treatment.
The Director General of NHIA, Prof. Mohammed Sambo at the workshop said the essence of the meeting is to sensitize the desk officers whom the agency uses to represent enrollees at the various MDAs to tell them about the new things so that they can go back to their respective MDAs to begin to educate people about all the things happening in the NHIA, and other things that they need to know and how the program works.
The DG who was represented by General Manager, Formal Sector Program, Dr. Eke Jonathan reiterated that initially, cancer treatment has always been covered but people did not know.
He disclosed that the formal sector program provides coverage for most people that are working for both the organized private sector and the public sector.
“The reforms happening is to see that every Nigerian irrespective of their social economic status, tribe or religion covered and has access to good quality health care without having to bear the challenges of paying for them.”When we talk about cancer care a lot of people go to the drugs but we know that a lot of the expenditure that they do in terms of cancer therapy go to drugs.
“What we used to have before within the NHIS, is that we used to have drugs for cancer, but they were the first-generation drugs cytotoxics. There are newer generation drugs that are in the market now, and that have better efficacy to take care of a lot of these cancers”.
According to him: “The Roach partnership is giving us some of the very potent drugs that we can use for some forms of cancer. However, there are a lot of other pharmaceutical companies that are coming in, not just for cancer. That fits within the framework of a bigger picture, which is the national health medicine supply. We are liaising with most of the pharmaceutical companies to provide drugs for our enrollees.
The DG further explained that surgeries are part of cancer treatment and there are so many ways to treat cancer, even radiotherapy, drugs, and surgeries, as he said they are already covered.
“For cancer care, we have a cost-sharing approach to it. Even with the work we are doing with Roach; Roach is taking 50 per cent of the cost, NHIA will take 30 percent, and the enrollee will take 20 per cent of the cost, which is something”.
“If you look at it in terms of percentage, they have already taken away 80 per cent of the cost from the enrollee. It is a good way to start because these things are very expensive. The aim is to reduce the burden on the patient. Because cancer treatment is a super specialty thing, so it is not every hospital that takes care of it. So, we have certain facilities that we have started to deal with.”
“I know the University of Benin is there, UNTH, and some other hospitals across the country because these are referral cases; primary and secondary providers cannot take care of cancer treatment.” He added.
The Director of Occupational Health, Safety and Environment of the Office of the Head of Civil Service of the Federation, representing the Permanent Secretary, Service Welfare Office, Mahmud Kambari also explained that the program is organized in collaboration with the National Health Insurance Authority to educate and provide information that will inform decision making by the formal sector enrollees where they fall into as civil servants.
He said If this is not done, it will affect the implementation of the new Act adding that in order to bridge that gap they have to organise the workshop.
“The people brought here today are the NHIA Desk Officers. These Desk Officers are your point of contact when you get to any MDA. These officers need to know that things have changed since the NHIA Act was signed in August 2022.” He added.
