CODE Appeal to Kaduna Government to Speed up Completion of 255 PHCs
By Uangbaoje Alex, Kaduna
Connected Development (CODE), an accountability and transparency NGO, has appealed the Kaduna State Government to complete work on the 255 Primary Healthcare Centres in state to enable her citizens, especially those in the rural areas access to quality healthcare services.
The Chief Executive Officer of the NGO, Hamzat Lawal, raised the concern on Friday in Kaduna when his team paid a courtesy visit of the management of the State Primary Healthcare Agency following finds of some health facilities project they tracked and monitored in two Local Government Areas of Kauru and Jema’a in the state.
Lawal who was represented by CODE’s Program Lead, Lucy James, revealed that the facilities are in need of serious intervention.
Lawal said that CODE being an NGO that focuses on monitoring and ensuring that the needful is done in government spendings on projects and facilities were orchestrated to monitor two public health care centers.
Lawal added that the health care centers are part of the 255 renovated centers being upgraded by the kaduna state government.
Lawal further said that the Purpose for their courtesy visit is to ensure that the Agency is updated with their monitoring reports in two vital communities of the state.
“We conducted our tracking activities on Madaci village, Kauru and Linte Godogodo, Jama’ah local government to ensure the government expenditure on those rural areas on primary health care was executed according to specifications.
“We needed to ensure that those facilities are in use because the facilities are being abandoned, there are no effective and efficient health care health workers and the facilities are not well equipped to meet the regular needs of the people.
He added that the health care centers were poorly constructed, with out fence, water and other needed equipments.
Lawal noted that the essence of their monitoring was to ensure that government money works on every one and also to ensure that everyone can access quality health care.
“We want to ensure that Nigeria actually attains the SDGs by 2030; and also to ensure that everybody’s voice count, we want to ensure that the indices of death is reduced in Nigeria, he said.
“We also want to ensure that children and pregnant women are attended to on time in our health facilities that should be up to standard and approved world wide.
“We want to ensure that we get access to the bill of quantity of each of the 255 HCF in each of the local government being renovated by the state and ensure that our grass root mobilizers go the communities and make reports on what is going on.
“We appreciate the agency for listening to us and they have assured us they would monitor on their own to feed us back on if actually our findings are true and we will work towards ensuring that these gaps are being closed, Lawal said.
In his response, Executive Secretary of the agency, Dr. Hamza Abubakar, commended CODE for her interest and passion in following development in the health sector and also for support the government at ensuring the right things are done in order to achieve result.
He said apart from making sure the 255 PHCs are functional the state government have more packages lined up for her citizens.
According to the ES, who was represented by Auwal Waziri, Director Budget and Planning of the agency, the state government have already given an ultimatum for immediate completion of the 255 PHCs and that once they are completed the government have the intention of expanding the scope.
“It is expected that if you want to have a functional healthcare delivery system, three things are key, they are; human Resources, Standard Facilities and Equipments. All these government is already putting in place.
“Our intention is that by January 2020, all the new workforce will be in their various place of work. You can see that this government is not sleeping in ensuring a working healthcare system is in place.” He said.
The ES, promised to look into the two cases presented to the agency by CODE, saying “we will see what input we can make when we look into the case. While you are doing your own part, we will see what we can do on our part.”
