By Alice Etuka, Abuja
The Minister of Health and Social Welfare, Professor Muhammad Pate has said that the government had doubled the enrollment quotas in medical, nursing and other health professional schools from 28,000 to 64,000.
Pate announced this on Friday, May 24, 2024, during the Sectoral Ministerial Press Briefing to mark the one year anniversary of President Bola Tinubu held in Abuja.
The Minister, while reeling out some milestones recorded in the past year, stated:
“We doubled the intake, enrollment quotas in schools; medical schools, nursing schools and other health professional schools from an enrollment target of 28,000 a year to 64,000.
“Now that is just the first step, the education sector would have to play in, the state would have to play in to improve the infrastructure, the training tools to produce more health workforce because we need to produce more health workforce given that we are losing some, so that we can serve the population of this country”.
He noted that up to 1400 primary health centers were now able to provide skilled birth attendance.
Also, “more than 2400 health workers; doctors, nurses, midwives have been recruited in facilities to provide services to Nigerians, many of them work in rural areas providing essential services”.
He further disclosed that the government had laid an agenda to recruit 420,000 frontline health workers in the span of three years.
In another development, the Minister explained that they had disbursed 25million naira to improve health outcomes of Nigerians at the Primary Healthcare Center level:
We’ve disbursed through the Basic Healthcare Provision Fund the first tranch of 25million through NPHCDA and NHIA, which is 8300 health facilities.
“We put a condition, that states that will access those have to comply with the statutory guidelines that we provided, responding to the lapses that have been observed over the years so that the resources will go to Nigerians.
“Twenty three states have received those funds and I believe that the rest of the states are just about to complete their own financing channeled through the PHCs”, he said.
