The World Economic Forum Africa (WEFA) 2014 hosted by Nigeria in Abuja has come and gone but it would no doubt continue to reverberate especially when key players who pledged their commitment to assist Africa in re-strategizing on its maternal and child healthcare commence implementation. As a fall out of the forum, the Private Sector Health Alliance (PSHA) led by the chair, Dangote Group, Aliko Dangote launched a $24m ‘Save a million lives initiative’ to help reduce maternal and infant mortality in the country. Speaking with our Assistant Life Editor, YINKA SHOKUNBI, former Minister of Health and Visiting Professor Duke Global Health Institute, USA, Muhammad Ali Pate, explained the benefits of the fund and why the private sector needs to invest in healthcare delivery. Excerpt:
Pate
Reasonably, there is an urgent need for the private sector to assist government by investing in healthcare because there is the need to grow the health on the continent.
My take is that the African Health sector can indeed make it especially with the backlog of communicable diseases, HIV/AIDS and other infectious diseases as well as other category of non-communicable diseases and injuries once the private sector partners can complement what the public sector or governments are doing.
If we take a look at most of the spending on health, it is from the private pocket, what we call out of pocket, and this is even more than what the governments are contributing; and also, more than half of the services are being run by the private sector. And even for most of those who go on medical tourism abroad, they go to private facilities.
So, the important role the private sector can play in making progress to achieve the Millennium Development Goals in terms of innovations, improving the quality of service delivery will contribute to the economic growth of the continent.
When we examine the critical role of technology and medical equipment in service delivery as well as the question of maintenance, we would understand that healthcare is not just about facilities but maintaining the facilities as well. So, the conversation that was around this was indeed needful.
Likewise, the conversation around prevention of diseases was quite important; since we tend to often focus more attention on treatment, we discussed the importance of how to make prevention key in healthcare delivery.
The Effectiveness of the PSHA in Nigeria
For the Alliance to be quite effective in Nigeria, there are some things the government would need to do in terms of policy and in terms of regulations. The private sector also needs to organise itself and for the first time, the Private sector Alliance has created the needed platform to bring together leaders and to mobilise their resources in a coordinated manner in order to compliment what the government is doing to achieve an all-round health objective which is for both public and private sectors.
The fund raising that was done would be used to focus on real cost-effective interventions like zinc and oral rehydration salt for diarrhoeal diseases, misoprostol for post-partum haemorrhage, this is a very concrete but underutilised essential commodities that can save the lives of both women and children.
Most of the fund would equally go to service delivery and overhead and so we feel for a start, the private sector is going to save at least about 50, 000 lives out of the 400, 000 lives that government is targeting this year in the save a million lives initiative.
We are urging other private partners to join the alliance so that the country can make real progress. We already have private sector initiative complementing in power as well as in security around infrastructure and so a private sector Alliance in health is very much welcome.
The Issue of Human Resources for Health
Yes, the health sector is largely dependent on the quality of its human resources. From the way the personnel are trained to how they are deployed and to the quality of team that is available and to even whether they are working as a team or not. I mean are the Doctors, Pharmacist and Nurses working together or not as these are all together to work for the patient to get better.
For the Nigerians in diaspora there have been yearnings for them to come back home and I think they are willing to and already some are finding their ways to come back but the environment surely has to improve more and more especially with the transformation that is going on.
Health Bill and Conflict among health workers:
Well, I cannot speak for government any longer as I am no longer there but I agree with you that the rules and laws are necessary. One thing that is very clearly important is that the legal framework for the players has to improve even for the private sector participation. So the essentials of a legal framework cannot be overemphasised in terms of health governance. I cannot say how soon that would be but it is for the government to tell.
Looking back as a former Minister:
I think in my view, it is easy to complain but more difficult to create solution for the people to improve the system and in all certainty, government alone cannot solve all the problems either at the state or local levels. For sure, all hands need to be on the deck both at the public or private sectors. I am calling on everyone to put heads together to find solutions to our health challenges rather than continue to criticize whatever we have on ground; it is how to work out solutions that can make a way forward.
The WEFA was hosted for the first time in West Africa and repeatedly, we knew as a country we were having a hole in our heart giving the girls that are still missing in Chibok and repeatedly members of the Forum expressed their support and solidarity but it was a good thing the forum was successfully held.
The post ‘Health sector depends on quality of human resources’ appeared first on Daily Independent, Nigerian Newspaper.