FCT strengthens referral system for better healthcare accessibility

On May 14, 2024

FCT-HES Mandate Secretary, Dr Adedolapo Fasawe, said that the Federal Capital Territory has strengthened its health system as patients are now documented electronically. Fasawe said this on Monday, in Abuja during a two-day Area Council Dissemination meeting on the United States Agency for International Development – Integrated Health Programme (USAID IHP) project in the FCT.

According to her, the five-year USAID IHP expanded technical support to Nigeria is designed to champion reducing child and maternal morbidity and mortality in FCT.

“Due to the intervention of IHP, we have almost perfected our referral system; when people go to the primary healthcare centres, they will be documented electronically and can be referred without stress. We have more than 60 sets of closed-user telephones donated to us through the project. Now our two referral system is very smooth because, before a patient is taken from one spot to the other, somebody will be accepting the person at the other end,” she said.

On maternal mortality, Fasawe said that the present administration had zero tolerance for it.

According to her, IHP has helped in ensuring that no woman dies due to childbirth complications.

“The project helped us to look at low-hanging fruits and the only way to reduce maternal mortality is by education, advocacy and sensitisation,” she said.

Fasawe said that FCT had made health insurance free for pregnant women who reside in the territory.

“If you are pregnant, register for health insurance, and your delivery as well as the baby, for the first year of the child, will be taken care of,” she said.

Fasawe said that the territory was faced with the death of Human Resources in the health system and as such was transferring skills and training community health workers to mount those primary health centres.

“We have a lot of infrastructure in the FCT but we don’t have enough human resources to man the places. The project has supported us in training community people to give out the basics. In terms of drugs, we are strengthening our drugs revolving system and we will make sure that at no point in time, you go to any primary healthcare centres, they will tell you there are no drugs. We have drugs in almost all the centres that people access,” she said.

Dr Yakubu Mohammed, Ag. Executive Secretary of FCT Primary Health Care, said that the objective of the project was to strengthen health systems supporting Primary Health Care (PHC) services.

Mohammed said that it would also improve access to primary health care services and increase the quality of PHC.

“This will help to implement priority PHC interventions, to strengthen the health leadership and ward-level health systems as well as strengthen engagement with the government.

The USAID IHP is USAID’s expanded technical support to Nigeria to rapidly scale up proven reproductive, maternal, newborn and child health, nutrition and malaria (RMNCH+NM) interventions. It targets improved access to and increased quality of primary health care service delivery.

NAN/Wumi