The Special Adviser to President Bola Tinubu on Health Matters, Dr. Salma Anas-Ibrahim, has said the poor attention to primary health care in Nigeria adds to the burden of morbidity and mortality, especially due to pregnancy-related conditions.
She also said the challenges to reducing maternal and child deaths remain the problem of a poorly functional primary healthcare system with issues of low healthcare coverage for life-saving interventions, ill-equipped and weak service delivery systems, and low coverage with community and household-level interventions, among others.
She said this on Friday at the seventh annual conference of the Association of Nigerian Health Journalists in collaboration with the World Health Organization in Nasarawa State.
According to her, the PHC is the fulcrum for a resilient health system and should be structured to be able to deliver services that will support the attainment of universal healthcare and guarantee health security.
She notes that in Nigeria, however, the PHC level of care has received the least attention and continues to add to the burden of morbidity and mortality, especially due to pregnancy-related conditions, making it the weakest link in the health service delivery system.
The presidential aide noted that Nigeria is a contributor to the global burden of maternal and newborn deaths despite being about three percent of the world population and is responsible for about 30 percent of the world’s gap in achieving the global target of eradicating mother-to-child transmission of HIV.
She said some of the socio-economic challenges contributing to preventable diseases and deaths also include general poor health-seeking behavior due to poor literacy and socio-cultural factors, long distances to health facilities and lack of transport to referral facilities, poverty, and lack of access to water, sanitation, and hygiene, among others.