The Executive Secretary of the Kaduna State Primary Health Care Board, Dr Hamza Abubakar, explained why the Kaduna PHC Management Capacity Strengthening Project (KPMSP) is necessary.
Dr Abubakar said that government has invested so much in upgrading Primary Healthcare Centres, recruited new staff and a lot of programmes are now sending funds directly to PHCs.
The Executive Secretary further said that there is need to boost the capacity of the staff of PHCs, adding that that was why the project was conceived and executed.
“We conducted a kind of assessments to see what management capacity do we have actually among our staffs? And we realized that it was not optimal. So, this programme was designed to bridge that gap in management capacity.
“We conducted it in about three or four forms; the first one is the systems development whereby we developed job descriptions for all the Officers In Charge (OIC) and their deputies.
‘’We developed a handbook of management of how, as an OIC, you can manage a health facility successfully, that is for systems development,’’ he added.
According to Dr Abubakar, the agency developed seven modules to build the capacity development of the OIC, ‘’ including data management, public financial management, quality improvement, facility management, human resource management and logistics and supply chains.’’
Dr Abubakar expressed confidence that now, ‘’when we send resources to these PHCs we have competent people to manage them.‘’
He emphasized that the whole aim is to look at each health facility as a semi-autonomous health unit, whereby the OIC gets resources, knows how to manage them with the necessary supervision of the local government, the zones and ‘’the overarching supervision and guidance of the Board.‘’
