Stakeholders decry poor healthcare system in urban slums

Stakeholders in health and urban planning on Saturday decried the poor state of health and healthcare services in Nigerian urban slums.

They noted at a virtual meeting that Nigeria was rapidly urbanising with about 53 per cent of its urban population residing in slums.

The stakeholders noted in the “Virtual policy dialogue on the state of health and healthcare in urban slums’’ that Nigeria would have more urban slums soon if its economic and housing policies did not improve dramatically.

The virtual meeting was hosted by the CHORUS-Urban Consortium Research team based at the Health Policy Research Group (HPRG) of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka.

It focused on World Cities Day and attracted participants from Africa and Europe.

The participants noted that health standards and healthcare services of slum dwellers created anxieties, and stressed that government should give health challenges faced by slum residents, priority attention.

They agreed that increasing urbanisation was stretching health facilities, noting that without committed health investments, current number of health facilities and workforce would not contain the demand for quality health services.

Prof. Chinyere Mbachu, who manages the CHORUS project, described the poor state of healthcare in slums, drawing from research evidence collected by the CHORUS-HPRG team from eight slums over a two- year-period.

The research evidence, she said, included the domination of the healthcare space in slums by informal healthcare providers like traditional healers, traditional birth attendants, and patent medicine vendors (“Chemists’’).

She added that the situation had helped urban slum dwellers to shun formal health services provided at primary healthcare centres.

Mbachu, a professor of Community Medicine, said findings showed that more than 80 per cent of the informal healthcare providers presented inadequate knowledge of common diseases.

This, she stressed, underscored the poor quality of healthcare services slum residents received.

In his contribution, Dr Harri Bala of the Federal Ministry of Health listed the social and economic challenges confronting slum dwellers to include poor hygiene, sanitation, water, and housing conditions.

“These poor conditions compound their many health challenges,’’ he said.

He explained that many slum dwellers lived in houses that were inhabitable, and always became an eyesore whenever it rained, exposing residents to a wide range of infections and diseases.

Worse still, the slum dwellers were still faced with either poor quality or complete absence of decent formal healthcare, he said.

In his submissions, an urban planning expert, Dr Victor Onyebueke said: “every slum in Nigeria is an eviction waiting to happen.’’

He said the health security of slums might never be achieved for as long as governments refused to recognise slums as residences of people that deserved some level of attention.

“This is so because slums do not have a consolidated place in government plans; rather government looks forward to a time the slums will be evicted,’’ he stressed.

Proffering solutions, Prof. Obinna Onwujekwe, Coordinator of HPRG and Director of Research, University of Nigeria, said on-going intervention by the CHORUS Project was addressing mapping and pulling of informal healthcare providers into the formal sector.

He stressed that the intervention aimed at enhancing regulation and supervision of the informal healthcare providers to stay within defined scope of service provision.

This, he added would facilitate timely referral of cases to the closest formal health facility for professional attention.

Onwujekwe emphasised that the intervention was a product of co-creation where all stakeholders, including informal and formal healthcare providers, policymakers, and community representatives agreed to implement co-created intervention as a team.

“The intervention in Enugu State is a low-hanging fruit for the government in the direction of improving health and healthcare services in urban slums,’’ he said.

Contributing to the dialogue, Ms Ifeyinwa Ohiaeri, Director of the Southeast Pharmacy Council of Nigeria, expressed the readiness of the council to train and retrain patent medicine vendors.

Beneficiaries would be trained in the provision of preventive and basic healthcare in cases of malaria, diarrhoea, and nutritional deficiencies in slum areas, she said.

She also expressed the need for the revitalisation of primary healthcare facilities to engender the trust and confidence of slum dwellers in them.

Supreme News reports that CHORUS is a consortium that brings health systems experts from Africa, Asia, and Europe together. It enjoys funding by the Medical Research Council.