Stakeholders Seek Review Of Reproductive Health Curriculum

Some stakeholders in the health sector have advocated a comprehensive review of reproductive health curriculum in Nigerian Universities to include prevention and treatment.

They made the call in Abuja on Monday while speaking at the opening of a two-day workshop on reproductive health curriculum review.

The stakeholders were concerned that the current curriculum focuses majorly on treatment, a reason he said was responsible for high maternal deaths in country.

A renowned Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Benin, Friday Okonofua, said there was the need to train medical students on how to prevent conditions that would lead to maternal death.

Okonofua, who leads the African Centre of Excellence in Reproductive Health at UNIBEN, said the meeting was convened due to issues related to reproductive health, which is the signs of reproduction that governs population, process of development, child birth.

He commended NUC for recently coming up with the new Core Curriculum Minimum Academic Standards (CCMAS), for Universities, saying it was unfortunate that the issues of Sexual Reproductive Health Rights (SRHR), were almost neglected.

“So, we want issues on right, social justice, gender and equity to be included in our curriculum, so that our students will have comprehensive exposure.

“Today Nigeria is known to have the one of highest rate of maternal deaths – women who die during child birth in the world.

“So, we are worried that most of the components that are currently on our reproductive health, surround the treatment of condition that leads to death rather than its prevention.

“We believe that before a woman comes to the hospital, pains would have occured. And it is important that our training curriculum – undergraduate and post-graduate – are designed in such a way that students are made to be aware of the way to prevent these issues from reoccurring,” Okonofua stated.

In his presentation, Dr. Ibrahim Abbas disclosed that every six minutes, a Nigerian woman dies needlessly as a result of unsafe illegal abortion.

He noted that while Nigeria continues to lead the sub-region in adopting global and regional initiatives to address sexual and reproductive health (SRH) disease burden, the country still has some of the worst reproductive health (RH) indices in Africa.