The Borno State Contributory Health Care Management Agency (BOSCHMA) has announced its readiness to implement the formal sector healthcare insurance scheme across the state.
Dr. Saleh Abba, the Executive Secretary of BOSCHMA, disclosed this on Thursday during a stakeholders’ sensitisation engagement held in Maiduguri. He said the initiative marks a major step toward strengthening access to affordable healthcare for workers in the formal sector.
Abbas announced that the state government had also approved the implementation of the formal sector scheme at the state level with immediate effect.
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The executive secretary said that Gov. Babagana Zulum has further approved 6.5 per cent of the basic salary as part of the contribution of the state’s government in order to facilitate the commencement of
The formal scheme in ernest.
“We all know that it has to do with the employer and employee contribution, when the employee is to contribute 3.5 per cent of his basic salary, and then the employer which is the state government has to contribute 6 5 per cent.
“This is what actually brought us to look at how we can implements the programme without any hitches, and we all know that situation today is very difficult for the citizens in the state and that is why the agency has been established from the beginning,” he said.
Abbas said that their priority was to make healthcare services to the citizens in the state well accessible, affordable and of great quality toward achieving the desired objectives of the scheme in the state.
The executive secretary also said that accreditation for the service providers, the healthcare facilities had concluded.
“We have about 200 primary healthcare facilities across the state, and then we have about 40 secondary healthcare facilities which we did alongside National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) as partners and every two years, those accreditation has to be reviewed in order to ensure that those facilities were able to maintain their standard,” he said.
Abbas said that the scheme would start in ernest with the state civil servants, followed by the local government civil servants.
“A lot of primary healthcare facilities had been built up by the state, over a 100 of them and also the secondary healthcare facilities have been upgraded from general hospitals to now specialist hospitals.
“We also have general hospitals coming up in most of the towns and local government areas that have been resettled. So I think we are good to go as far as the facilities are concerned,” he said.
According to him, the agency has put on the eligibility criteria for the enrollees in the formal sector.
“We have the principle enrollee, which is the civil servants under the payroll of government, then his spouse, it may be her husband or his wife, then also four children, so the maximum of six per family.
“In addition to that, if the person wishes to enrolled more people under his care, we also have what we called extra defendants, but that one is coming with an extra cost, because the government is only subsidising for the principle enrollee and his immediate family which is the spouse and the four children,” the executive secretary said.
Also speaking, Mr Yusuf Inuwa, the state Chairman of the Nigerian Labour Congress, said that the commencement of enrollment of beneficiaries under BOSCHMA was a strong indication of Zulum’s administration’s commitment to ensuring accessible and affordable healthcare services delivery to the teeming workers in the state.
Inuwa said that the Labour union discovered a lacuna in the bill shortly after it was assented to, regarding the a provision which required a flat rate contribution across the civil servants irrespective of their levels, but after their objection, it was rectified to make the contribution on percentage basis from the worker’s basic salary.
He, however, appealed to BOSCHMA to bring in the Labour Union to be part of the monitoring team in checking the operations of the healthcare facilities when the scheme fully takes up for transparency and accountability.
The Head of Service, Dr Mohammed Ghuluze, thanked the organisers for the sensitisation engagement on the formal sector scheme, saying the commencement of enrollment was a milestone in the pursuit of quality healthcare for the citizens in the state and the credit must be given to BOSCHMA.
However, the newsman reports that BOSCHMA had already enrolled 4,000 civil servants into the scheme alongside their 12,000 defendants, totaling 16,000 beneficiaries so far on its database.