‘We’re taking healthcare services to rural communities’

Abubakar Adamu Bappa is the new Mandate Secretary of the Health and Human Services Secretariat of the Federal Capital Territory Administration (FCTA). In this interview, he speaks on the administration’s move to rehabilitate abandoned rural health centres. Excerpts: As the Mandate Secretary of the Health and Human Services Secretariat, what are your plans to improve […]

Abubakar Adamu Bappa is the new Mandate Secretary of the Health and Human Services Secretariat of the Federal Capital Territory Administration (FCTA). In this interview, he speaks on the administration’s move to rehabilitate abandoned rural health centres. Excerpts:

As the Mandate Secretary of the Health and Human Services Secretariat, what are your plans to improve healthcare services in the FCT?

I just assumed duty as the mandate secretary on October 30, 2018. Firstly, I was able to take briefs from all the departments of the secretariat and other agencies, and in fact, the 14 known hospitals in the FCT and I have actually appreciated the magnitude of the whole job. I only call for the cooperation of all those that are concerned in the secretariat.

We are already mapping out strategies on how to ensure that we improve healthcare services across the territory for the benefit of the masses.

Don’t you see your appointment as a big task?

In fact, even the area council service secretariat that I was before my appointment was a new office since I had not been either a secretary or a commissioner before. I was doing my normal work at the place before I was called upon to take over the health sector.

However, coming to the health secretariat is not a new thing to me as it is addition of experience, and having worked for the last one year at the area council secretariat, I have come to appreciate the fact that working with people and understanding their needs and also trying to solve such needs and proffer solutions to them is one of the very important things in life. And health wise, we are looking beyond the area councils as we intend to go into the rural areas to provide healthcare services to them.

What are your plans to address lack of access to healthcare services by the rural communities?

As it is, the Primary Health Care Board (PHCB) is the one taking care of all the rural health centres, but apparently, at the area council, there is a department of the same magnitude, but here, it is a separate board which is supposed to be of the same status under the secretariat. There is supposed to be synergy between this board and all the primary health centres in the FCT, and there is a bill before the National Assembly on that. The idea is to bring all the public health centres in area councils under one roof under the same board.

So in my thinking, in the next few months after we have actualised the bill, we will now work hand in hand with all the area councils to put the issue of primary healthcare in a very good perspective.

I just want to add that there is a plan to build a Health Technology College (HealthTech) in the FCT; which has been on the drawing board since 2012. So we are picking it up as it is already in the budget of 2018. We even had to go to the Federal Ministry of Finance to start looking for ways and means to actualise the HealthTech, because if the school is established, it will take care of all the staffing of all primary health centres and it will also reduce unemployment across communities.

Many beautiful primary health centres have been built and will be handed over to us very soon.

There are some health centres built by the FCTA and some by NGOs which have been abandoned. What you are going to do about them?

Thank you very much for drawing our attention to some of these uncompleted health centers which I will delegate my staff to visit and take stock of them. I am assuring you that we shall follow up to ensure that contractors handling such projects are mobilised back to site.