NEWS: Northern States to Adopt Primary Health Care Policies

 BY: Abubakar Mohammed

The Permanent Secretaries from different Ministries of Health from six states who were in Adamawa State on a study Tour Mission have resolved to adopt the health policies initiated by present administration to improve Primary Health Care service delivery in their respective States.

The leader of the delegation Dr. Musa Usman Matazu, who is also an adviser of Maternal New-born and Child Health MNCH2 project made the pronouncements while briefing the Hon. Commissioner State Ministry of Health on what he described as real PHC service delivery in Adamawa State, the PHC  model in this state is worthy to emulate he said. “We are in Fufore and Yola North and what we really saw is highly impressive, this is vertical transformation of health facilities from near next to nothing to something very admirable in line with global standard”. Performance Based Financing (PBF) is really working but a question about the sustainability of programme after the pooling out of partners matters a lot “Adamawa State is leading in terms of PHC service delivery we will borrow a leaf from you in order to strengthen our interest, commitment, political wheel to implement this laudable projects and programmes in our respective states”.

Dr. Matazu, however call on Adamawa State Government as a matter of urgency to take issue of human resources for health very serious because the facilities we saw in all places we visited need to be man by  qualified technical staff; according to him, you can not equipped a clinic and allow it to be man by non technical staff.

Responding on behalf of His Excellency Governor Mohammed Umar Jibrilla Bindow, the Hon. Commissioner State Ministry of Health Dr. Fatima Atiku Abubakar, welcome the delegation and informed them that PBF program started as pre-pilot in State in December 2012, scale up to three LGAs in 2013  and in 2014 in all the LGAS. Modalities for PBF sustainability is one of the top issue in the state proposed strategic plan she said. 

Finally, she used the forum to comment the efforts of Dr. Belel in bringing Primary Health Care under one roof in the state.

The six States involves in the study Tour Mission includes; Jigawa, Kaduna, Kano, Katsina, Yobe and Zamfara.