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Increase funding, only panacea for universal health coverage – Lagos Speaker
The Speaker of Lagos State House of Assembly, Rt Hon. Mudashiru Ajayi Obasa has maintained much more funding need be afforded, the health sector in Nigeria for it to seamlessly attain the Universal Health Coverage (UHC) target as set by the World Health Organisation (WHO)
Obasa while speaking at a two day programme aimed at enhancing salience and capacities of legislators and key stakeholders in the health sector of Lagos state, in a bid to catalyse Nigeria’s progress towards universal health coverage.
At the two days forum organised by the Lagos State House of Assembly in conjunction with Legislative Advocacy Initiative for Sustainable Development (LISDE),with a thrust of enhancing healthcare availability in all forms.
The Speaker was represented by his Deputy, Hon. Wasiu Saani Eshilokun, stated the importance of capacity building for lawmakers and care givers in the health sector in the state to advance a better healthcare model across the state.
The Deputy Speaker said it is a continuation of a national health summit held in Abuja annually.
“To my mind, the biggest challenge facing the health sector in Nigeria is lack of adequate financing. This is because none of the other problems is too obscure to identify or complicated to solve, but the achilles’ heel is the wherewithal to the solution.
“On this ground, I salute the determination of the stakeholders in this sector for your efforts day and night to tackle these rather evasive but tormenting problems .
“Lagos State is discussing the whole gamut of issues related to health from the legislative actions to be taken to improve the health of the people of Lagos.
“How to increase funding the accessibility to healthcare and the awareness, it is basically to improve the health of Lagosians.
“To increase the awareness and also look at ways and means by which we would get our people to access the facilities that we have in good time. It is also to improve funding during budgetary allocations.” Eshilokun said.
In his keynote address to herald the session the Chairman House Committee on Health Services, Hon. Akeem Olusola Sokunle said that the import of the forum is to address the basics, in ensuring Universal Health Coverage (UHC) and to further deepen the understanding of the legislature on Health Financing and Public Health Coverage (PHC) policies and objectives.
“It is targeted at strengthening the state’s health sector, it is also to deepen the legislators understanding about health financing, universal health coverage, public health coverage,objective and policies.
“ It will also enhance the legislative functions and its application to expand health financial risk protection mechanisms to cater for the targeted population.
“It will help them to gather knowledge of the use of information to develop implementation framework, strategic agenda and work plan in the administration of legislative functions towards strengthening healthcare.
“It is also to track the progress on past legislative commitments in promoting universal health coverage and articulate plans to implement pending commitments.
“Capacity building of this nature is meant to achieve universal health coverage attainment, to assess health facilities in Lagos State without any hardship.
“After this capacity building. It would assist all legislators in the Lagos State House of Assembly to be able to know what to do when the issue of concerning health security”.
The Chairman House Committee on Information, Strategy and Security Hon Setonji David who was part of the capacity building forum, harped on the accessibility factor when healthcare facilities need be visited by patient in dire need of care.
“The forum is trying to sensitize the Honourable members and people in the health sector,on very germane issues of healthcare, talking about availability of health facilities in Lagos.
“It is obvious that Lagos is above board in terms of performance. We believe that with this kind of sensitisation it would ginger us to ensure that we do more.
“ Lagos is trying in terms of health facilities but we have not reached the target.
“The need to have health facilities within two kilometers or thirty minutes trekkable distance to people in need of healthcare is not yet attained in Nigeria even in Africa, and that is the ultimate goal as recommended by the World Health Organisation.” David opined.
In a chat with newsmen at the venue of the programme in Lagos, the Executive Director of LISDEL, Mrs Juliana Abude-Aribo, gave the Lagos State Government a pass mark regarding health financing while also acknowledging a lot more could still be done.
When asked about her assessment of Lagos effort towards achieving the Universal Health Coverage, she said, “Lagos is doing relatively well, there are areas of course that need to be improved upon.
One of the reasons we are here is because of basic health provision for the people, what you called in Lagos, Ilera Eko, there is also improvement in the primary healthcare system in Lagos”, Abude-Aribo said.
Dr. David Olayemi made further input on the need for more legislative backing to make UHC attainment seamless.
The event which was well attended by Lagos lawmakers, Civil Society Organisations (CSOs), Community Based Organisations (CBOs), civil servants and other stakeholders in the health sector, will be be brought to a halt on Friday.