By Gloria Ikibah
The House of Representatives has called for partnerships to support the implementation of a Legislative Activity Framework aimed at improving specialised healthcare services across the country.
Chairman of the House Committee on Specialty Healthcare, Rep. Alex Egbona, made this appeal during a stakeholders’ roundtable in Abuja on Wednesday.
He highlighted key focus areas for collaboration, including mental and brain health, trauma care, and obstetric fistula treatment. Other priority areas include oral health, ear and eye care, blood transfusion and management, as well as anaemia treatment.
Additionally, Egbona emphwelsed the importance of advancing traditional, complementary, and alternative medicine, alongside innovations in specialised healthcare.
“In the course of our legislative duties and committee activities, we discovered some cross cutting challenges faced by all specialised healthcare providers and institutions in Nigeria.
“They include infrastructural decay, lack of requisite medical equipment, poor electric power source/ supply and poor / inadequate funding.
“The committee sadly notes that the specialised hospitals and healthcare centres serving the nation as referral hospitals on specialised health emergencies are the lowest funded in the health sector budgets.
“The Committee therefore invited you all here today as professionals and experts to review the Draft Legislative Activity Implementation Framework, make your observations, contributions, interventions and inputs on the document,” he said.
Rep. Egbona said that the expected outcome include improved legal and legislative framework for robust legal environment that enables the deployment of secure and efficient e-Health systems.
The reps said that enhanced digital healthcare access, increased adoption of digital health technologies to improve patient outcomes and access to care was expected.
“It seeks Improved Mental/brain Health Services for better allocation of resources to underserved areas and addressing gaps in service delivery.
“It also seeks increased awareness and reduced stigma for greater societal understanding of mental/brain health, leading to reduced stigma and better utilisation of mental/brain health,” he said.
In his remarks, Country Programme Manager of Christian Blind Mission (CBM), Mr. Michael Idah, called for greater attention to be given to the elderly and Persons With Disabilities (PWDs), emphasizing their frequent exclusion from essential services, particularly healthcare.
He stressed the need for stakeholders to ensure the sustainability of the framework, noting that this would prevent the need to restart efforts in the future.
Similarly, Rev. Fr. Sebastian Sani, who is the Executive Director of the Justice, Development, and Peace Commission (JDPC), an agency of the Catholic Church, expressed the commission’s support for the initiative. He reaffirmed the church’s commitment to caring for people with special needs, particularly the underprivileged in society.
“Currently, we have up to 100s of people with disability that as a church, we are paying for their health insurance.
“This gathering and meeting with stakeholders, will further encourage us to do more,” he said.
Sani called for the establishment of Specialty Healthcare Trust Fund that cooperate and private individuals will contribute to in support the sub sector.
The Deputy Chatman, FCT Association of Integrative Medicine Practitioners, Dr Jackie Ikeotuonye called for a regulatory council.
She said that regulation of alternative medicine especially traditionalist who inherit some form of skills from their mentors or parents was imperative.
Ikeotuonye said that there is need to regulate and determine dosage as people are made to drink all sort of concentrated mixtures.
“You see the way the world is moving now, there is need to put some regulations, especially like where a traditionalist is telling you go and pluck some leaves.
“What leave? What Quantity? Who is directing who? Of course, there is been a lot of abuse in that sector, people drinking all manner of our war with different things, killing their kidneys and all that.
“So this is timely, and we strongly believe that part of the outcome of this, what the committee is doing is to ensure that there is a council, which I we are told, is already on the President’s table, waiting for assets,” he said.
The committee gave stakeholders 10 days to further peruse the legislative activity implementation framework and submit memoranda for implementation.