Osun to receive World Bank $20m to fix healthcare facilities

ARRANGEMENTS have been concluded for the Osun State government to receive a sum of $20million to fix healthcare facilities, in the state, the Minister of Health, Professor Isaac Adewole has disclosed.

Making this disclosure while receiving Osun State governor, Mr Gboyega Oyetola in his office in Abuja, he explained that the money was the earning of the state from the World Bank-supported Saving One Million Lives (SOML) programme for result initiative.

This was contained in a press statement endorsed by the Chief Press Secretary (CPS) to the Osun State governor, Mr Adeniyi Adesina, which was forwarded to Tribune Online in Osogbo on Wednesday.

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According to the statement, the SOML programme was aimed at giving incentives based on achievement of results (health outcomes) and helping to drive institutional processes needed to achieve results, adding that it also sought to catalyse change in the way health business was being done by focusing on results and governance.

The statement reads, “the programme is financed through the $500m International Development Association (IDA) credit to the Federal Government over a period of four years, for distribution to states on the basis of performance. States are assessed based on the implementation of a number of maternal and child healthcare indicators, which determine what is earned.”

Responding, Oyetola said Osun State would use the money to rehabilitate 332 out of the over 900 Primary Health Centres (PHCs), pointing out that “this will be on the basis of one PHC per ward, so as to bring healthcare to the doorstep of the people at the grassroots.”

The governor, who is the chairman of the committee on healthcare which he constituted immediately after his inauguration, said he took charge “to put my eyes on the ball and ensure that the 332 PHCs go into full operation within the shortest possible time,” stressing that “a healthy state is a wealthy state.”

Oyetola, however, expressed optimism that he was looking forward to the actualisation of the planned upgrading of the Wesley Guild Hospital in Ilesa to a Federal Medical Centre.