NMA blames state governments for poor state of Primary Healthcare

The Nigeria Medical Association has blamed the state governments for the poor implementation of Primary Healthcare programmes in the country.
Dr Francis Faduyile, the President of NMA, told the News agency of Nigeria on Tuesday in Abuja, that the poor handling of primary healthcare was due to negligence and poor commitment on the part of state governors.
He stated that the state government had largely abandoned the state health system, stressing that they had allowed it to suffer serious setback.
According to him, the state government are in charge of primary healthcare centres and they are in charge of the secondary healthcare
institutions and the state government had largely not been up and doing in this regard.
He said that the NMA had increased its advocacy and would open up discussions with the state government to see what could be done to remedy the embarrassing situation.
He said: “We are hoping to go to the Governors’ Forum when next they have a meeting to draw attention and address concerns, “primary health care is very important in rectifying the health situation in the country”.
Faduyile noted that it was also bad enough that the Federal Government had been paying lip service to the issue of brain drain that could help in salvaging the health sector.
According to the NMA president, we have observed that the governments have been paying lip service to health and we have been one of those people who has advocated severally for increased enrolment into the health insurance scheme.
He said that as part of measures to salvage the health sector, the NMA had taken a step to support Community Health Insurance Scheme.
He said that the association would support states that were forming their health insurance scheme, urging them to seek for guidelines from NMA to do it the right way.