The federal government onSaturday said robust healthcare investment in the sector has yielded a threefold increase performance at Primary Healthcare Centres (PHCs) across the country.
Speaking at the Annual Review meeting of the project in Abuja, Executive Director of the National Primary Health Care Development Authority (NPHCDA), Dr Ado Muhammed said the project under the Nigerian State Health Investment Project (NSHIP) has yielded threefold increase in performance of healthcare facilities at the pilot states.
According to him, “what the project has done is a new approach to service delivery in which the approach is to shift from input to output as they are now looking at results in terms of what the funds has resulted to. Muhammad said:
“The focus is on performance as we look at how many lives have been saved, what disease burden has been reduced, how many immunisation sessions are taking place, the outcome in terms of maternal mortality reduction, and how many women have attended antennal care?
“The essence of today’s meeting to carefully review how far we have gone at delivery in terms of performance and to see how we can further improve on the programme.”
Muhammad contended that “For these three years we have seen improvements in service delivery as more women now go for antenatal care, there are skill birth attendants during delivery, more children are been immunised and we have seen a threefold improvement in terms of performance.”
Muhammad noted that service delivery at the implementing states have improved, adding that that he envisages that at the end of the day, the states will take over the programme as they hope to entrench it within the system so that even by the time project is over, those good practices will continue in the system.
Earlier, the Director of Primary Health, Care Systems Development at NPHCDA, Dr. Nnenna Ihebuzor, stated that the difference between this project and others is that its financing is based on performance as facilities must report on agreed targets.
She said the essence for implementing health facilities is to scale health services, “If you agree that you are going to increase your coverage by a certain per cent, we will then check at the end and you will get an incentive for this in terms of bonus for the facility and it will be given some financial autonomy to use that and improve its services.”
Ihebuzor observed that “when you increase the utilisation of healthcare services with increasing the quality, you may actually be doing harm”.
NSHIP, a World Bank health system financed project piloted in three states of Adamawa, Nasarawa and Ondo is aimed improving interventions targeted at maternal and child healthcare. It is also meant to increase the delivery of high impact maternal and child health interventions and to improve the quality of care at the selected health facilities.
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