Governor Yahaya Bello of Kogi State

The Kogi Government says it will establish special healthcare centres to be called “Health Care Plus’’, designed for pregnant women and new born babies across the state.

The state Commissioner for Health, Dr Saka Harunah, disclosed this in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Lokoja on Wednesday.

Harunah said the scheme would be a project with multiple components to cater for the pregnant women and their new born babies from the day of delivery up to 28 days of life.

He explained that the programme would be executed in phases and the first phase would be to identify 12 existing primary healthcare facilities; four centres in each three senatorial zones of the state.

“The second is to train the existing health staff in those centres and also deploy additional staff where needed for effective health care service delivery.

“These staff would be trained by the World Health Organisation certified pool of trainers, to train and upgrade them to the required level for the initiative.

“The third and fourth components are that free and subsidised services would be rendered, which is a template to initiate the much needed State Wide Community Based Social Health Insurance Scheme,” Harunah said.

The commissioner said accessibility into the scheme had already been designed in which a pregnant woman would only pay N1,000 registration fee, and another N1,000 at the point of delivery.

He said all the drugs, investigation, medication and all other services that would be rendered at each centre would be free including the delivery kits.

“In instances where the centres may not be able to handle some critical cases due to their level of operations.

“Such category of patients would be referred to secondary or tertiary health centres like the Federal Medical Centre, Lokoja.

“In such cases, the state government would pay 80 per cent of the total bill of such patient which is the aspect of subsidisation of the programme.

“Our target is that by 2019, maternal maternity rate in Kogi would have been reduced far below 100 per 100,000 pregnant women and 10 per 100,000 childhood mortality rate.

“We are hopeful by the special grace of God to flag-off the programme by December, after the renovation, upgrade of the centres and training of staff would have been completed,” Harunah said. (NAN)