By Victoria Onehi
The Scale-up and use of Self care interventions as outlined in the National Guideline on Self- care for Sexual, Reproductive and Maternal health will boost Nigerias’ modern contraceptive prevelence rate,the In-Country lead,Self Care Accelerator Project by John Snow incorporated (JSI), Miranda Buba has said.
The global public health care and health systems consulting firm gave the assurance on Wednesday in Abuja, during the launch five Reproductive Health Documents.
She said: “Self-Care for Sexual, Reproductive and Maternal Health has the potential to boost Nigeria’s modern contraceptive prevalence rate, result in cost- savings and accelerate progress towards achieving universal health coverage Self-care will empower women and men, families, and communities to carry out effective health actions, with or without support from health care providers.”
She further stated that the value proposition with self-care and DMPA-SC self-injection lies in the opportunity to support healthcare systems “This innovation includes interventions that are targeted at safe self-administration of some medicines, self-diagnosis and improvement in health awareness/literacy. Self-care offers a paradigm shift, empowering individuals and communities and saving the bludgeoning healthcare cost.”
Buba said over the past six years, Access Collaborative has supported the Family Health Department to revise the Task Shifting and Task Sharing policy, expand access to DMPA-SC through a range of delivery channels, including community-based distribution and patent medicine vendors hence JSI is delighted to have the opportunity to support the epoch-making event of the launching the five documents.
The Minister of the Health,Dr Osagie E. Ehanire while launching the five important health policy documents to provide policy direction to stakeholders in the Reproductive Maternal, Newborn, Child and Adolescent Health and Nutrition Service delivery space said though progress has been made over the years in the scale-up of the delivery and uptake of family planning services and commodities more needs to be done .
He said “it is obvious that more work needs to be done to achieve the set targets and ultimate goal towards ensuring that women are supported to make choices in their quest to meet their maternal and family planning needs. Currently, our modern Contraceptive Prevalence Rate is at 12%, which is far below our FP 2030 target of 27%.”
“The Task Shifting Task Sharing Policy is one of the strategies for accelerating achievement of the Sustainable Development Goal 3, and was approved by the 57th National Council on Health (NCH). It focuses on key priority areas such as Family and Reproductive Health, Reproductive Maternal and Child Health Services (RMNCH), as well as HIV/AIDS, TB, Malaria, and other communicable and non-communicable diseases.”.he said.
The Minister said the Federal Government is committed to providing Comprehensive and Integrated Sexual and Reproductive Health Services to all persons, especially adolescents and women who constitute a significant percentage of the estimated over 200 million Nigerians.
In his goodwill address,the Country Representative of the World Health Organisation (WHO) Dr Walter Kazadi Mulombo said more efforts are needed in ensuring implementation of these policy guidelines and use of the tools at the state level.
