Oyo State Government says it has partnered with the Sustaining Programme and Partnership on Reproductive Health Transformation (SuPPoRT) initiative to validate the mappings of health facilities in the state.
The Commissioner for Health, Dr Bashir Bello, made this known in Ibadan on Monday, while flagging off the Facility Map validation.
Bello said that the collaboration would give the state the rare opportunity to identify the situation of healthcare facilities on ground in the state.
He said that the collaboration would also give the state an opportunity to identify the situation of its health institutions.
The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the commissioner was represented at the occasion by Dr Mufutau Ayoola, the Permanent Secretary in the ministry.
Bello said that the state government was interested in collaborating with relevant organisations, such as the ‘SuPPoRT initiative’, to help improve on what the state was doing in healthcare.
“This initiative is particularly important in the sense that, one of the pillars of Gov. Seyi Makinde’s administration, is health, and we all know that health is wealth.
“We know we cannot do it alone, but to collaborate with relevant partners, so, this SuPPoRT Initiative is a big thing, which will be of assistance to the good people of Oyo State.
“If you click Oyo State’s website, you can easily see the number of facilities that are providing family planning and how the place is being utilised.
“At the same time, people can make use of the facility in so many programmes; be it Tuberculosis, Malaria or HIV.” he said.
On essence of the initiative, the Technical Assistant Consultant of SuPPoRT, Mrs Adesola Fanimokun, said that the well-based map would be of immense benefit to the state government to facilitate improvement in its health sector.
Fanimokun said that the initiative would also give people of the state opportunity to access the data and all the health facilities in every local government area “even from the comfort of their homes”.
She said that it would also equip them in the aspect of functionality and other processes.
“If you click on a local government and a particular facility of your interest, the partners who are in that facility, the family method which the facility offers, and the size of the technical officers and the staff strength of that facility will be displayed.
“We have donors and partners, international organisations coming into this place, rather than all of them coming to Ibadan and stay within the centre.
“When they have access to this map, the state will be able to present this map to them, show them the concentration of partners and they will be able to identify the LGA that does not have partners’ support.
“It will also help the state itself to identify what it has, all the data that we put together on this map are already existing as individual data.
“But, now that they are joined together, it helps the state to know the situation of its health institutions.
“From that map, you can tell how many health facilities the state has; how many PHCs, and by the time you click on any of them, it will give you details.
“It helps with what the present administration is doing in health. So, this will arm them with the data of each facility or which facility needs more attention or equipment and staffing,” she said.
Fanimokun said that the initiative had been configured in such a way that it would assist the state to expand it beyond family planning programme.
“We know the government needed it and we supported the government to do it.
“It is to build on what Nigeria Urban Reproductive Health Initiative (NURHI) has done; the strategy that NURHI has used, which has been proven to work.
“So, the aim is to ensure that the state government have the power to continue to sustain it, “she said.
In his remarks, Dr Abass Gbolahan, Director, Planning Research and Statistics, said the initiative had made the Health Ministry in Oyo State go digital.
He said: “If you look at what is happening now globally, the whole world is going digital. And, we are also looking at a situation whereby we can get information at first hand.
“So, what this initiative wants to do for us is to harness the data, which we already have in the state.
“We have the longitude and latitude of most of our facilities, but they have assisted us in putting them together to have an information in such a way that if anybody gets into our site and wants any information on health facilities in the state, if you just click on it, you will get everything you need.
‘Secondly, for partners that are coming to work in the state, we have the existing ones on that site.
“So, any new partner that comes into the state does not even need to ask us where they want to work, they already know where existing partners are,” Gbolahan said. (NAN)
