NHIS has covered less than 5% of Nigeria’s population ―Ibrahim

The Acting Executive Secretary, National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), Mallam Attahiru Ibrahim, on Thursday, disclosed that the Scheme has not been able to cover less than 5 per cent of the nation’s population since it was established.

He regretted that the scheme had so far only captured “small number of Nigerians” who are in the services of the Federal, State and Local Governments, while the rural dwellers are yet to benefit from the Scheme.

Ibrahim who was represented by the South West Zonal Coordinator of NHIS, Mr Adelaja Abereoran, at a one day sensitisation workshop for Uniformed Officers and Men in Ogun State, added that NHIS had directly engaged the state governments to establish their own agencies, so as to capture their staff.

While speaking on the theme of the workshop “Enrollee Satisfaction: A Pathway To Universal Health Coverage”, Ibrahim said the agency would not accept any unsatisfactory services from Health Maintainance Organisation (HMO) or other health providers.

The NHIS boss said, “Basically, what we are doing for now, we are covering Federal Public servants and that is quite limited. But what we have also done in recent time is to directly engage with the state government to establish their own state agencies and then cover their staff both at the state and Local Government levels.

“Again, when you add all the Federal, state and Local Government public servants together that is still small percentage of the entire population. But we have other programmes that can take care of various other segments of the population. For instance, the Community-based programme. The Community-based programme has the capacity of covering people from the informal sector and they can organise themselves into communities. Communities are not just by geography. You can organise people by geography in a particular community, you can also organise them along occupational lines. You can organise artisans, Okada riders and all of that. By the time you do that we would have put a large population into the data-base.

“And we think in this way, we can enroll quite a number of people because the ultimate goal is to attain Universal Health Coverage at earliest time possible.”

The State Coordinator of NHIS, Olalekan Olabode, explained that factors such as delayed treatment, discrimination against public enrollees’ treatment denial are militating against the success of the scheme.

“If all stakeholders could unanimously agree on providing excellent services per times, the sky will be the limit for all. I.e in no time we will achieve the Universal Health Coverage”, Olabode said.