Akwa Ibom State Government has given its reasons for creating a primary healthcare development agency.
According to the State Govt, it is aimed at strengthening healthcare delivery at the grassroots and ensuring efficient management and supervision.
Professor Augustine Umoh, Commissioner for Health said;
“We are trying to have primary health care under one roof. Under the primary health development agency which would mean that everything about primary healthcare will be under the agency.
“Presently, we have the primary healthcare domiciled in the ministry of health and we have the local government service commission, who really pays the workers under the local government system. Some of these challenges are there.”
“This could have been done long before now, as you would remember the EndSars protests of last year in which the office of the primary healthcare development agency was vandalised. The place was well set up, it was one of the best in the country, and they went there and destroyed many things. We need to put all that back together. First of all we have to wait for the insurance company, the owner of the building, to restore it, this took us away from our initial plans.
“We are conducting training for the primary healthcare workers to bring them at par with their counterparts in other parts of the country.
“This will be followed by the enumeration of the different primary health care centres to know what we have and find out what should be done,’’
He also dismissed insinuations that the state government has abandoned the primary healthcare, explaining that;
“it may look like nothing is happening, but work is ongoing, when we have done what we are planning to do, we will be able to have more funds from the national primary healthcare development agency, so it is not being abandoned.”
”Right now there are different controls of primary health care staff working in this area, going forward, all the staff shall be under the control of one agency, the Akwa Ibom State primary health care development agency. “
