THE Federal Government has announced plans to engage 200,000 community health extension workers nationwide to help tackle health challenges in rural communities.
Executive Director of the National Primary Health Care Development Agency (NPCDA), Dr Faisal Shuaib, made this known on Thursday at an interactive session with the media in Abuja, organised in collaboration with Community Health Research Initiative (CHRI).
He said this initiative was necessitated by the exit of the midwives from the midwifery scheme, adding that the midwifery could not be retained because the midwives were not comfortable staying rural areas.
He lamented that Nigeria has one of the highest under-five mortality and maternal mortalities globally, saying the desire of the government was to invest in the citizens, especially investment in the area of providing quality health services for the women and children in the country.
According to him, community health extension workers and nurses were most appropriate to attend to minor health cases, leaving doctors to attend to complicated issues at the secondary and tertiary health levels.
“In actual fact, we do not need doctors in primary health care facilities. We need community health extension workers, we need midwives, we need nurses in our primary health care facilities. The doctors are expected to work in the secondary and tertiary health care facilities,” he said.
Shuaib said: “One of our priorities was engaging with stakeholders across board including state governors and they are excited about having some women in our communities addressing some of the basic health challenges.
“We hope that in the next few weeks we should be able to roll out in states the community health workers. The idea of community health workers is not totally new. This is about bringing every other initiative together. We have development partners that are bankrolling some of these initiatives.
“For instance, 18,000 volunteer community mobilisers are bankrolled by the United Nations Education Fund (UNICEF). But what we are saying that let’s harmonise all that. So, instead of having about 20,000 of these community health workers, which is just like a drop in the ocean, let it be scaled up.
“Everywhere there is evidence that community health workers improve health outcome. So, we are going to scale up from around 25,000 that we have to about 200,000 across the nation. We are going to do it in such a way that is conceptualised,” he said.
He explained that the about 25,000 community-based health workers already on ground through the contribution of donor agencies, included the traditional birth attendants. He said what the government intended doing was to give them additional training and expand their scope.
“We need people living closest to the communities to work in the primary health care facilities where they are well known, where they are trusted and that is why we need to strengthen the PHC facilities so that community health extension workers, community health officers will manage the basic cases like malaria,” he said.
Dr Shuaib explained that the community health extension workers would be responsible women with at least an elementary school education with the ability to provide simple cure, carefully selected by the community members, community chiefs, opinion leaders, civil society organisations within the community.
According to him, this was to eliminate situations where unskilled workers take deliveries, and to ensure that all deliveries are carried out in health care facilities where if there is a complication, it would be immediately addressed before it gets too late.
He noted that his administration has introduced various reforms to strengthen the primary health care services in the country.