Nigeria’s Primary Health Care Lack Required Skilled Birth Attendants – NPHCDA

By Deborah Onyofufeke, Abuja

The National Primary Health Care Development Agency, NPHCDA, yesterday, disclosed that Nigeria’s primary healthcare system lacks the required skilled birth attendants.

The Executive Director, NPHCDA, Dr Faisal Shuaib, giving statistics to this finding said 25,380 primary health care centres across the country have no required skilled birth attendants.

He also said only 1.8 % which represents the country’s 463 out of 25,843 primary health care facilities have the required skilled birth attendants.

Dr Shuaib, made the disclosure in Abuja at the media briefing for the official launch of Community Based Health Research,Innovative Training and Services Programme, CRISP, which was arrived at as a mechanism to address the challenge of unequal distribution of doctors in the rural primary healthcare facilities.

Dr Shuaib disclosed that the CRISP innovation was developed by the agency as part of its agenda to close the gaps on the adequacy and distribution of human resources for health at the primary healthcare level and it will be launched on Monday the 22nd of May 2023 at the Banquet Hall of the State House.

He noted that,CRISP is a partnership between the Teaching Hospitals, Federal Medical Centres, National Primary Health Care Development Agency, State Primary Health Care Boards, Local Government Health Authorities and the communities to support primary health care development.

“The intervention specifically focuses on increasing, retaining and improving the quality, adequacy, competency, and distribution of a committed multidisciplinary primary health care workforce that includes facility outreach and community-based health workers supported through effective management supervision and appropriate compensation, Shuaib said”.

He bemoaned how the primary health care centres have become the most unattractive to skilled health workers who prefer to be stationed at urban secondary and tertiary health facilities.

He noted that this is a contributing factor why the PHC delivery in Nigeria has been experiencing setbacks.

The NPHCDA director added that they have it on scientific evidence, that the interventions provided by skilled health workers, namely doctors, nurses, midwives, or CHEWs trained on MLSS can reduce maternal and new-born mortality in low and middle-income countries, including Nigeria.

He explained that this is why CRISP needed as it aims to leverage the rural posting of Resident Doctors from teaching hospitals to boost and guarantee the quality of care at the PHC level through active involvement in primary health service delivery.

He said the implementation of CRISP is targeted at improving Reproductive, Maternal, Newborn, Child and Adolescent Health, amongst other health services within the benefiting communities.

“In addition, Human Resources for Health (HRH), particularly skilled birth atttendants, such as medical Doctors, midwives, nurses, and community health extension workers (CHEWs) that have been trained on how to manage emergencies would be recruited and deployed to priority primary health care facilities across the country.

“We find it extremely important and helpful that we address the human resource for health gaps in our primary health care centres because 80% of the incidence of maternal and child deaths in Nigeria occur at the community levels, largely due to the lack of services of skilled health workers in the primary health care facilities.

“Consequently, our CRISP initiative will operate at scale involving Teaching Hospitals and Federal Medical Centres across the country. This means that the CRISP resident doctors from the engaged teaching hospitals and federal medical centres would be deployed to the primary health care facilities to support service provision and on-the-job capacity building of the PHC health workers. CRISP is targeted for implementation across the 36 states of the Federation plus the FCT in a phased manner”.

Dr Shuaib said CRISP being a multi-stakeholder investment, will be funded by the Government of Nigeria with support from development partners, philanthropists, among others.