The Senate on Thursday called for an increase in the budgetary allocation for primary health care (PHC) services in Nigeria.
The Senate also urged the Ministry of Health to create awareness on the benefits of health and life insurance.
This call followed a motion on the need for increased funding of primary health care sponsored by Oluremi Tinubu (APC, Lagos Central) and 106 other senators.
In her motion, Mrs Tinubu said a lot of the problems in Nigeria’s health sector can be traced to the low performance of primary health care facilities.
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According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), primary health care will meet 80 to 90 per cent of a person’s health needs in a lifetime.
There have been efforts but the PHC system is dogged by multiple challenges in Nigeria, mainly because billions of naira government at all levels released over the decades for health facilities were mismanaged.
The federal government has also ignored existing and underfunded PHCs and continued to build more across the country without any plan for sustaining and equipping them.
President Muhammadu Buhari, in January 2017, flagged-off a scheme to revitalise about 10,000 PHCs across Nigeria.
But more than a year later investigation found that very little work had been done.
