FG ranks Nasarawa best in COVID-19 vaccination campaign

The Federal Government has ranked Nasarawa State as the best-performing state in the COVID-19 mass vaccination campaign.

The National Primary Health Care Development Board made this known, on Thursday, at the COVID-19 performance review meeting held in Abuja.

The NPHCDA also said Nasarawa State has constructed 19 new facilities and renovated 90 health facilities.

The PUNCH reports that as of December 13, no fewer than 60,405,071 of the total eligible persons targeted for COVID-19 vaccination have been fully vaccinated while 12,370,205 of total eligible persons targeted for COVID-19 vaccination have been partially vaccinated.

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The progress report of vaccination in the country shows that as of November, the top five performing states in COVID-19 vaccination are Nasarawa, Jigawa, Osun, Kaduna, and Kano.

The NPHCDA said Nasarawa state represents all that is needed in terms of effort to build resilient primary health care; the effort that traverses programmatic, infrastructural, workforce, and fiscal initiatives.

The agency said key achievements in the state cuts across vital components of the health system including programmatic, infrastructural, workforce, and fiscal successes.

Speaking with journalists at the end of the meeting, Governor Abdullahi Sule of Nasarawa state said his government has set up sustainable foundations for healthcare delivery.

He said, “If you look at most of our policies, they are policies that whoever is coming in should be able to follow and sustain.”

He noted that the state gives automatic employment to qualified graduating nurses in a bid to meet the required human resources shortage in the health sector.

“Nasarawa state still requires a lot of other competent people in the medical line and if you look at it, we’ve just established the medical school at the Federal University in Lafia. We’re just establishing our teaching hospital for the first time Nasarawa is one of the states that don’t have a teaching hospital,” he added.

Also speaking, the Executive Director of the NPHCDA, Dr Faisal Shuaib said the agency needs more human resources, infrastructure, equipment, commodities, utilities, and primary health care centres for better health care of Nigerians.

Shuaib said “Large proportion of our population of over 70 per cent are in the rural areas and the access that they have to health care has to be in the primary health care centres.

“If you’re able to manage these conditions at the primary health care centres, you see that there will be decongestion at the tertiary health services so that doctors in the tertiary health centres will be focusing on more complex disease conditions, not a situation where you find people lining up in the outpatient department of tertiary hospitals trying to treat just diarrhoea or malaria,” he said.