For several years, the Ministry of Health has been governing the operations of Regional primary health care facilities with the development of a Nationwide Health Care plan rather than an individualised one.
However, each region will now have its primary health care developmental plan. This was revealed by subject Minister Dr Frank Anthony on Tuesday.
He explained that they have embarked on this venture because “each region have different patterns of disease so our morbidity patterns are different by region, mortality patterns may be different and therefore we cannot have a plan that is one size fit all for the whole country.”
Dr Anthony adds that for each Regional plan “there will be core things that will cut across all the regions but there will be some level of changes and specificity depending on the problems that we have in those regions.”
With the development of these personalised plans to expand the primary health care system, the Minister says this will pave way for better health education.
He posited that there is a need for better health education because “early detection of diseases and again because we are closer to the community we will be able to detect a lot of things earlier once we train the people at these facilities to make those decisions to have the tools.”
Dr Anthony adds “early detection can save us a lot of resources down the road because if we find them earlier we can treat them in some cases cure them earlier and not develop complications.”
He further noted that with this plan each region will be able to outline clearly what type of medications they need while highlighting that access to the medication has always been a challenge for many citizens.
“In cases at the central level you may have meds but on the periphery and where people need it the most, they cannot access it. Now we don’t want that to happen we want to have a more sensitive system so that before shortages pop up at the primary care level at these different health centres or health posts we must have a system to tell us that we need some additional medication so that we can send them in early,” he said
He further emphasised the need for Health care workers to develop a good relationship with the public.
“When people come to our system we also have to immune that compassion that health workers are known for and not that when people are coming or want to come to the health system that they have some anxiety because they don’t know if when they come to this health centre somebody is going to be rude to them .”
These regional health plans will also accommodate persons with comorbidities who may not be able to go to these facilities.
