By Kolawole Ojebisi
The Kano State Government has revealed that workers across health facilities are colluding with the supposed beneficiaries on its “free drugs initiative” to steal drugs.
The Commissioner of Health, Abubakar Labaran Yusuf, made this known when he attended a stakeholders engagement organised by the Centre for Communication and Social Impact (CCSI).
He said, “That one is a very serious issue that is hindering the process of the programme (free drugs in Kano). A lot of people both from the workers and the beneficiaries of the programme, they connive to steal the drugs which is a sort of depriving person who really needs the drugs from getting the services. This is one of the problems that we are addressing and we have succeeded greatly but still there are some pockets of thefts in facilities.
“We are going to make all our records electronic-based and make provision of what we call utilisation registers. Whoever comes to the hospital to access service, it will be documented with name, address, phone numbers so that we can always cross-check to make sure that the number we provide is the number that accesses the services.”
Dr Labaran also expressed displeasure over what the called the low rate of women attending antenatal and postnatal care which he said had been an issue especially across rural communities.
“The implication of women not coming for antenatal care and for delivery is untimely death because if you do not access humans in pregnancy, you cannot plan for delivery and unplanned deliveries are usually the ones that come with complications and issues which mostly occur in remote areas that you cannot even transport the woman to the centre she should be taken care of.
“These contribute to high maternal mortalities in the whole northern part of Nigeria and Kano in particular. We have seen that. We are coming up with figures as we have done a year’s study in most of our communities. We did verbal autopsy and we are going to come up with actual maternal mortalities spread in Kano.”
He said the state government had embarked on statewide renovation of all facilities and employment of health workers to make them more convenient and conducive to deliveries.
Earlier the Senior Technical Advisor, CCSI, Oluyemi Abodunrin, said the meeting was aimed at interrogating Kano State policy on women health, its effectiveness and seek ways of improvement so as to better the health of women and girl child in the state.
