The Nigerian Government disclosed that the FG is set to achieve its target of constructing 100 oxygen generation plants since the start of the pandemic to ensure oxygen efficiency.
This was disclosed by the Health Minister, Dr Osagie Ehanire, at the 17th edition of President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration scorecard series.
The Minister noted that before the pandemic started in 2020, Nigeria had less than 30 oxygen-generation plants.
Oxygen sufficiency: The Health minister stated that FG noticed it had less than 30 plants when the pandemic which was a cause of concern towards achieving oxygen sufficiency and healthcare delivery, saying:
- “ We realised in the course of COVID-19 the importance of oxygen, and that the oxygen plants we had in the country before were less than 30, with many of them not functional, so the first thing we did was to get support to activate the existing oxygen plants and to build new ones.
- “The Federal Government built one oxygen plant per state in every one of the federal institutions and later on we were able to get funding from Global Fund and UNICEF to further build more.
Committed to 100: Ehanire added that FG is committed to achieving 100 oxygen generant plants and has so far built 90.
- “Today we have over 90 oxygen generation plants from less than about 30 functional ones before and we are going to have one oxygen generating plant in every senatorial zone so that we have over 100 functional oxygen plants.
- “This is so that oxygen is available throughout the country and we have full oxygen sufficiency both for private and public hospitals and even for Primary Health Care (PHC) centres across the country and the question of oxygen not being available will be a thing of the past.”
Healthcare Provision Fund: He also added FG operationalised the Basic Healthcare Provision Fund (BHCPF), which has received and disbursed over N101 billion to over 7, 600 PHC facilities across the country as of October 2022, citing that expenditure on PHC accounted for only 4.6 per cent of current health expenditure. He added:
- “Although general government health expenditure increased, it was not enough to reduce out-of-pocket expenditure which increased from 71.5 per cent in 2019 to 72.8 per cent in 2020, still far off our target of less than 40 per cent.
- “Our joint effort is still required to drive the quest to reduce out-of-pocket expenditure, improve health system efficiency, increase government spending on health care and expand prepayment coverage and financial risk protection mechanisms.”
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The Nigerian Government stated that passengers visiting Nigeria would be screened using Rapid Diagnostic Tests (RTD) as Covid-19 cases rise in China following the end of lockdown restrictions in China.
Dr Geoffrey Okatubo, Director, of Port Health Services, said positive cases would be quarantined and all negative cases would be monitored as it plans to screen passengers coming into the country, using Rapid Diagnostic Test (RTD).
- “COVID-19 self-tests (RTD) will be handed out at all our international airports, land and sea borders, while travellers will also be informed on the importance of measures that they can take to prevent being infected.”