Health Care Canâ€™t Be Free â€“ Idris

Posted on: Thu 10-05-2018

Why Helipad at the Lagos State University Teaching Hospital (LASUTH) has not functioned two years after its installatio

We signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with a Consortium in 2016.

Unfortunately the Consortium did not fulfill its own end of the bargain and that MOU was terminated. They were not able to meet their own obligation. We are currently looking into a new proposal by another Consortium. So, the Lagos State Government did not do anything there to enable us determine the capability of the initial Consortium. What happened was an issue of missed obligation, which we are currently addressing.

What are the development plans of Lagos State?

These strategic plans we follow are in the following thematic areas – infrastructure, human resources, health care financing, service delivery, disease promotion, community engagement, among others, but because they are strategic plans, they are planned for a long period of time and are assessed as we go on. So, as we are implementing one, we are also implementing the other. Hence, it is a continuous thing. For example we said in building infrastructure, we will build primary health care facilities, secondary health care facilities and tertiary health care facilities.

Then, there will be improvements as we go along. That is why again we are talking about health care financing which we started some years back with free health but we also realized that free health cannot be free. So, the essence is to look at other ways of mobilising fund for the health sector and that is why we are planning the Lagos State Health Insurance Scheme.

So, it’s a phased strategic plan. This is the reason why I said we want to address the issue of our health reform agenda and then the issue of attitude, quality of care, and we want to be patient-responsive. So, any hospital that is found wanting will be death with.

People with disability are reportedly often denied health care over language barrier, and lack of rams to access health facilities

Let me say there is a law in Lagos State which deals with people with disability and a section of that law says these people with disability will have access to health care. I am not sure the law says its free health care. However, as a government and a responsible ministry we have also tried to address the issue of the law stipulated with regard to their disability. If you recollect again, several times the Lagos State Governor has said that any design of any of our facilities now must be in line with people who are physically or mentally disabled.

So, we need circular to propagate that law so that everybody involved will know his rights and responsibility and start preparing for that. The fact that you are disabled does not mean that you will just walk straight into the Lagos State University Teaching Hospital (LASUTH). There are still steps. I will take responsibility that enlightenment is key. Whether you are disabled or not your first port of call should be the primary health care facility from where you will be referred to either a secondary or tertiary health care facility.

The Medical directors are here; the chief medical directors are here. They will take this information and they will address this issue. I want to assure you that members of our society that fall into this category will be catered for, but we will come up with proper processes for engaging these people as a protocol so that everybody will know how it’s done.

Equity fund to operate the Lagos State Health Insurance Scheme

We should try to link this up again with the equity fund to care for financial contribution of those people that are poor who are not able to afford their own contribution to the health care system. So, the planned Lagos State Health Insurance Scheme will take care of that.

This is because this health insurance scheme is mandatory, but for those people who are poor.

Again in this type of environment if you allow the scheme to be open-ended, everybody will be poor. So, what we are doing which other developed countries are doing is that we are currently applying a tool in which a number of questions will be addressed and people will be scored depending on their level of poverty. The premium of those people that we find to be extremely poor will be paid from this equity fund and this will be generated from one per cent of the state’s consolidated revenue.

How much will be consolidated revenue be?

I cannot give you how much the one per cent of that consolidated revenue will be because I don’t know what the revenue of the state will be, but what we have done is to talk to the Ministry of Budget and Planning and according to the instruction from the Members of the Lagos State House of Assembly, every month periodically one per cent of whatever revenue that the state generates is put into that fund to ensure that this system will continue without any hitch.

By: Appolonia Adeyemi

New Telegraph News

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