Andy Esiet, Calabar
Cross River state government has decried the high rate of maternal and child mortality, inadequate human resources and low adoption of modern health techniques as it partners the Federal Government and others to attain Universal Health Coverage status in the nearest future.
Among these decisive moves to address above challenges, the state governor, Senator Ben Ayade said is the collaboration between the Cross River State Primary Healthcare Development Agency (CRSPHDA) and the National Primary Healthcare Development Agency (NPHCDA) to train health workers in the advance management of reproductive, maternal, neonatal, child , adolescent, elderly health and nutrition programme across the 18 Local Government Areas of the state.
Ayade who was represented at the flagging off of the training exercise in Calabar recently, the Director General of the (CRSPHDA), Dr Janet Ekpenyong encouraged the participants to remain committed and focused to the course of learning in order to be abreast with the new development.
He highlighted some of the challenges faced in the primary health sector which requires urgent attention to include the high rate of maternal and child mortality, inadequate human resources and adoption of modern Health techniques which she said the training is set to address.
In this regards, the governor said the essence of the training was to build capacity of health workers to ensure quality service delivery as Federal Government and state government work hand in hand to bridge the gap of limited human resource through the basic health care programme and employment into service respectively.
According to him, “it is pertinent that health workers are trained and retrained to ensure optimal service delivery which will encourage patronage in their facilities to complement efforts of the Community health influencers and Promoters (CHIPS) agents who will be engaged in influencing and mobilizing people to patronize facilities”.
He appreciated Global fund and NPHCDA for choosing Cross River State among the first 3 states in the federation for the pilot phase of the high impact Resilient Sustainable System for health(RSSH) project which will help tackle lapses in the Primary Healthcare facilities especially in the rural areas.
On his part, the Permanent Secretary of the Cross River State Ministry of Health, Dr Iwara Iwara lauded Global fund for the support and for choosing Cross River State to ne one of the beneficiaries while also charging the participants to take the training serious and help support the state to mitigate the high rate of maternal and infant mortality by ensuring to disseminate appropriate information to health workers at the various facilities and reiterated State Government’s commitment to ensure only qualified health personnel will be absorbed into the service.
Officials of the NPHCDA, said the NPHCDA is one of the subrecipient of the global fund project and one of the major benefits of the project is to train health workers to provide quality integrated health services to clients to ensure we reduce cases of low patronage of health facilities as well as mortality of mother and child.
The Programme which is sponsored by the NPHCDA through the support of the Global Funds Resilient Sustainable System for health will facilitate the high impact advance knowledge, train and produce at least 40 state level trainers on integrated service delivery to serve the state.
It will further build the capacity of at least 150 PHC service providers on the ward minimum Healthcare package using the integrated training documents developed to suit Cross River’s work pattern, program management, sensitization and mobilization for high impact program scheme.
