THE Federal Government has embarked on a reform programme in the health sector, through a new scheme entitled Saving One Million Lives (SOML) initiative in its bid to ensure the recent dwindling income from oil revenue does not have much effect on healthcare services in the country.
This was revealed by the Chief Responsibility Officer and Team Leader of Mothergold, Dr Adesina Fagbenro-Byron, while speaking at the end of a two-day workshop entitled: Saving One Million Lives (SOML), which held simultaneously both in Ibadan and Enugu, recently.
Dr Fagbenro-Byron further stated that the global and local partnerships “are the proven way of leveraging resources to meet the human development needs of society especially in health and social services sectors.”
He noted that “Our common objective is to unlock billions of naira for healthcare in Nigeria. The criteria to access these funds includes the states committing to match funds received with results achieved. The two-month implementation plan that this workshop sets to achieve is a clear strategy to leverage funding for resource gaps. As real development is state-led, the trigger for this initiative must be the Federal Government’s immediate release of health services development finance which is seed money with extreme multiplier effect.”
The development partners of the two-day event including the World Bank are providing support to SOML, through a Programme for Results (PforR) which will be implemented at state level, being closer to the people.
The workshop, which brought participants from government health ministries and department, as well as a few from the civil society, private sector and other stakeholders together, was used as a platform to galvanise areas of competence including contextual understanding of the challenge of healthcare services, technical assistance, monitoring and evaluation, environmental, as well as beneficiary support.
According to Fagbenro-Byron,”Nigeria now has a national and international consensus on the need to aim for Universal Health Coverage and improve maternal and child health, hence, the country’s justification for partnerships for development in the health sector, which includes a recognition that health of women and children is taken as a reasonably accurate gauge of the effectiveness of health service delivery systems of society at large.”
Other areas of focus were Pregnancy and Puerperium (paying special attention to the first few weeks of a baby’s life); inequity in access to healthcare, bad attitude and a lack of adequate numbers and quality of health workers; access to skilled care at birth and inadequacy of data and monitoring, among others.
“The Federal Government SOML which will deploy a Programme for Results (PforR) approach implies a significant shift in the way we manage the health sector from its current state of procurement-driven, budget constrained activities towards a situation where state government officials focus on key performance indicators and influence service delivery; independent data sources are used to verify results, States will be rewarded for improvements from their own baseline, the rate of improvement has to be greater than the historical “secular” trend, competition among states will spur good performance, and funds to the states though not huge, have a powerful multiplier effect with evidence of better performance.”
According to the facilitators, under the SOML (PforR), “states will be rewarded for achieving results in improving the quantity of services provided as well as the quality of care.”
The quantity of services provided is prioritised with 61 per cent of the resources from the PforR dedicated to rewarding improvements in six indicators, namely, Vitamin A, Pentavalent3 immunisation, use of ITNs by children under five, skilled birth attendance, contraceptive prevalence rate and prevention of mother to child transmission of HIV.
He added that “states will receive $205,000 for every percentage point increase (above six percentage points) in the sum of the six indicators.”
Stressing on what is expected from states to shift a historically poor performance on these indicators, Fagbenro said, “states will need to radically rethink and engage a range of actors in the search and deployment of locally tailored innovations that can improve health outcomes at the state level.”
