By Semiyu Olagolden
Health care services are a basic need of all human beings due to the nature of our body and its physical structures. Preventive, curative, and maintenance of health is an everyday service needed by all and sundry. It is akin to the food we eat, the absence of which our functions may be affected.
The nearer these services are to those who need them, the better it is for quick intervention when it is needed. Many people lose their lives because of delays in getting the right healthcare services. The farther the health center the more likely it is to lose any patient in need of urgent intervention. Many healthcare centers prefer situating their services where there is high population density, for good patronage. In the suburban and rural areas, there are scarcely any standard health centers. This usually results in avoidable death for those living in those areas.
Our rural communities are having more people in them than the cities and towns, yet there are more healthcare centers for less population of people. Many healthcare centers in these urban areas are redundant because of low patronage. The fear of moving into the rural areas is the lack of appropriate spending power for the rural dwellers. Basic facilities needed to run appropriate centers to support the people are not available in most of these rural settlements. That has deprived them of services they should have had from various private healthcare establishments.
Building healthcare facilities in these far-flung areas from the cities and towns by the government will be a waste of resources, as they seldom trust people who are not with them. On the other hand, the private health establishment would have a better rapport with them, and those facilities will be better managed and maintained. The cost of the government establishing these centers with appropriate staff that is living among them will be too expensive to maintain. Hence the need for these private practitioners to be harnessed for this great service to the majority of rural dwellers.
Having these partnerships with private healthcare practitioners will reduce the countless avoidable death among people while meeting the goals for health for all. The partnerships should be based on services to be rendered by these practitioners. This will give them the needed boost to move their services to those unreached populations. It will save the government from resource wastage, while services are provided on behalf of the people.
This private health establishment must be monitored to ensure compliance with the terms of the agreement on services to be provided, and the limits to their excesses. The people should be involved in observing and monitoring the services and the ways they are being treated by the staff of these establishments.
The way forward to making healthcare available to the majority of any population is through a public and private partnership that pays dividends to the citizens of any nation. Such programs are in the United Kingdom and parts of the United States of America. Other nations across the world are getting healthcare services closer to their people, through rural health clinics owned and run by private health establishments where required infrastructure is provided by the government.
Ours may be homegrown to make it more efficient and effective in delivering quality to the people, no matter how remote their abode may be. Already established healthcare centers in the cities can be encouraged to extend their branches to such communities with basic infrastructure to support their services. Facilities like simple laboratory equipment, and minor and moderate surgical equipment with power grids from the nearest power station to them. These can pull the redundant practitioners from cities to rural areas.
Accommodation facilities are needed that can serve the workers for easy presence in such communities. This can be made possible by soft loans repayable over a long period. It can also be gradually deducted from their allocation from time to time. All these will encourage robust participation in the efforts of the government to give standard healthcare to the people.
Young and active medical practitioners will be encouraged to go into partnerships of long duration with the principals of such hospitals. This will ensure the stability of such workers in those hospitals and clinics. Adequate remuneration will also be a pulling encouragement for those who will love to work in rural and suburban areas.
Harnessing these surplus numbers of well-trained healthcare workers from the cities and towns will transfer their services to the larger population that truly needs these services. Doing these can have more enticement for other services that are in excess in the cities, thereby reducing the population explosion in our cities and towns. The presence of these people can encourage more farming activities in the rural areas for the blossoming population ready to patronize their products. The spending powers of the rural dwellers can also be affected positively while reducing overstretching of the facilities in the town and cities. New towns and cities can spring up with all the attendant quality living for the people.
Harnessing these available private healthcare practitioners from the cities to the rural and semi-urban areas can stop the drifting of our well-trained healthcare and other workers to other countries.
Dr. Semiyu Olagolden MD. (RHYSANDERS) is a Nigerian medical practitioner of repute.