Many health centres in rural Nigerian communities lack adequate personnel and equipment.
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The women complained of a lack of medicine in the facility. Basic services such as family planning and laboratory tests are also unavailable. So, they travel for 30 minutes through rough untarred roads to Maitumbi, a town on the outskirts of Minna, the state capital, to visit the hospital and buy drugs. In the event of an emergency, pregnant women are attended to at home by traditional birth attendants.
“We usually have to go all the way to Maitumbi during emergencies at night because the health workers close from work at about 2 pm every day. They don’t give us any medical advice at the hospital or what kind of foods to eat as pregnant women. They only touch our stomachs and prescribe drugs that they don’t have. The crowd is always massive.”Even in the city, drugs have become more expensive.
“We don’t give the women in labour drugs or any traditional medicine to ease delivery. We just pray to God and hope that we don’t experience any complications. But when the situation gets complicated, we usually find a tricycle to take the woman to a hospital in town,” she said. “We have stopped family planning services because we don’t have supplies of the items we need. We have told the women that we cannot deliver the service to them anymore. We don’t have anything here, but some of them keep coming. We go to Gunu village to get vaccines for children. For child delivery, we usually use touch lights at night because the facility doesn’t have electricity.”
At Babangida She village in Shiroro LGA, when the situation became dire and help came from nowhere, the women started contributing money to make the health centre work, but now they are tired. Abarah Saleh, Mai Unguwa of the village, said it is stressful making sure their families don’t go hungry and still be worried about them falling sick because of the poor state of the facility.Zainab, Mr Saleh’s wife, said the women are often scared of emergency health crises.
Other times, it is more than the prayer that makes the mission houses attractive. At government hospitals, the waiting time is usually long because there are just a few medical personnel attending to a plethora of women, some of whom are heavily pregnant. When a doctor or nurse eventually attends to you, it is brief, and they quickly move on to the next person.
It seems more of a cultural thing. But it goes beyond that. Many of them cannot afford the money for hospital services, especially the cost of drugs and laboratory tests. They also complained that they needed more equipment and medical officials at the health centres. While the Doka Model Healthcare Centre closes at 2 p.m. and refers patients to hospitals in bigger towns for scans, the health post at Kwami Village is often deserted due to lack of basic amenities and workers.
Stephen Chukwumah, a Lagos-based doctor, said he decided to leave the country during his housemanship due to the “bleak economic outlook” of the country and the substandard state of the health sector. In 2022, he finally moved to the UK where he now works.A broken ambulance parked in front of the primary healthcare in Ipapo community, Oyo state
In April 2023, the national assembly debated a bill to mandate Nigerian-trained medical and dental practitioners to practice for at least five years before getting a full licence. But the federal government kicked against the bill. “We are working with the Ministry of Labour as well as Salaries Incomes and Wages Commission to address long-standing legacy issues of compensation and allowances, which will take time and more patience from health workers.
“The government is trying to employ more doctors but they are not coming forward. They are not applying anymore. For example, the federal government gave the UCH allocation to employ 100 doctors, but we couldn’t fill half of the allocation. Some that were employed didn’t resume. It’s a big problem. Only about five per cent of Nigeria’s 2024 budget was set aside for healthcare, which contradicts the African Union’s 2001 Abuja declaration to allocate at least 15 per cent of annual national budgets to health.
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