Health Commissioners and Executive Secretaries Of States Primary Healthcare Development Agencies drawn from 19 northern states in Nigeria have met in Abuja to share their experiences of COVID-19 vaccination exercise with a view to coming up with a learning model for future health emergencies.
The 2-day symposium with the theme, “2-Day Lessons Learnt Conference On COVID-19 Vaccination Interventions” was organised by Centre For Information Technology and Development (CITAD) with support from MacArthur Foundation.
Speaking at the conference the Executive Director of CITAD, Dr. Y.Z. Ya’u in his remarks said the purpose of the conference is to learn from what has been done in the last three years responding to COVID-19, and how to better prepare for what may occur in the future; and also how to use lessons learned to transform the nation’s health sector.
He said, “Over the last one, two years different actors, particularly state ministries of health and primary healthcare agencies have worked assiduously to address COVID challenge, to get as many people vaccinated as possible.
“We recognize that there was a big challenge, because in Nigeria there had been vaccine resistance, people didn’t want to be vaccinated. They’ve all gone out, deployed different techniques, approach, strategies to get as many people as they could.
Ya’u said the meeting is to listen to them to know what strategies they adopted in their different states and how successful the strategies were, and therefore share it with the wider public.
“Its not only to continue vaccinating, but to also help us prepare in case of any other emergencies in the health sector, we can easily draw from the lessons, what worked and didn’t work right so that we don’t have to be fumbling, we know the type of strategy that will work given our context and therefore use them, rather than blindly using everything and everything failing.
He however said the conference should have held some weeks back, but because they were targeting state actors.
“Essentially why we are doing this now is that we met last year and shared a similar experiences learning from different thing, and we all agreed to go back and implement what new ideas they had learnt, so we thought one year is a good time to come and reflect on what new successes have they achieved with the strategies they’ve learnt from the spheres. So that’s why we are doing it this time. We understand that COVID news has receded the background, but as one of the speakers said, COVID is not entirely gone, I think we have found a way to live with it.”
While speaking about healthcare system in the country, he said, “We know that we have shortage of doctors, professionals, shortage of facilities and drugs. How do we improve in terms of training quality professionals, how do we build capacity for local production of vaccines, how do we work to ensure healthcare works are motivated from traveling abroad.”
Also speaking, Taraba Commissioner for Health, Dr. Innocent Vakkai, who was represented by Dr Abe Agbu, said that other diseases are still looming in Nigeria, hence the need to compare notes.
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“It will be good if we can share experiences of what we are doing at different corners to mop up the diseases. There are still viruses coming, so we need to know what we are doing to tackle them. I challenge us to know what we are doing here to help one another,” he said.
