Governor Peter Mbah says his administration is in the process of constructing 260 primary health centres in all the electoral wards in Enugu.

The governor said he would also ensure that every local government area got at least one world-class secondary health facility.

Mr Mbah stated this on Sunday during an inspection tour of a primary health centre at Ogonogoeji Ndiuno, Akpugo, in Nkanu West LGA of the state.

According to him, his administration is prioritising healthcare delivery because it understands the importance of a healthy population and workforce.

He pledged that his administration would not relent until every child, mother, the elderly, and Enugu citizen had access to better healthcare.

The Enugu governor stressed that healthcare is at the core of what “we do in the state outside education in the social services sector, so that is why healthcare is taking the largest part of the state’s 2024 budget.”

Mr Mbah said the administration had undertaken a thorough study of the challenges in the primary healthcare space to have reliable data to craft adequate strategies to address them.

“That is why, as you must have heard from the Commissioner for Health, we are going to be developing 260 world-class Type-2 primary healthcare centres across the entire wards in Enugu state. Our strategy in that area is that rather than spread ourselves thinly across 557 primary healthcare centres, we want to focus on consolidating our resources and developing 260 world-class Type-2 PHCs.

“This is because we want to provide 24-hour services in each PHC so that at any time, you would have access to quality primary healthcare in our rural communities across the state,” Mr Mbah explained.

The governor also mentioned that the administration was already addressing the state’s poor health workforce density while equally paying attention to secondary healthcare.

He stated, “As part of our strategies, we are upgrading our nursing schools to colleges so that we can have more intakes and have more nurses and community health extension workers trained to man our PHC facilities.

“Part of our strategy is also to deploy technology. We have now started the process of capturing, in an electronic form, all the reports of those that have access to the healthcare system so that we can have an electronic health management system.”

He emphasised the need to bring more Enugu citizens under universal health insurance coverage, saying it was cheaper and more reliable, promising “to do everything to ensure we continue to improve on our healthcare performance index; and we will not relent until we get to that point where every child, every mother, and every elderly person in this state will have access to primary health care.”

The Enugu governor added, “We are also doing something in the universal health coverage. We have to begin to encourage our people to enrol. Just giving N1,000 every month would ensure that your ward has access to primary health care, which comes to N12,000 in a year. So, we need to increase awareness in this space for our people to take advantage of it because it does exist.”

(NAN)