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New Report Shows how Commercialised Healthcare Undermines COVID-19 Response in Nigeria
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Sunday Ehigiator
A new report released on March 2, 2022, by the Global Initiative for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, has revealed how the commercialisation of healthcare in Nigeria has been amongst the main factors undermining the response to the COVID-19 pandemic in Nigeria, with harmful impacts on the right to health.
The report, entitled ‘The Failure of Commercialised Healthcare in Nigeria during the Covid-19 Pandemic: Discrimination and Inequality in the Enjoyment of the Right to Health’, was carried out in partnership with the Justice & Empowerment Initiatives and with the support of Corporate Accountability & Public Participation Africa.
It detailed how governmental policies and international development actors have encouraged the growth of private and commercial healthcare since the late 1980s.
More recently, successive policies have listed the creation of an enabling environment for public-private partnerships and private sector engagement in healthcare over 2004-2018.
The National Strategic Health Development Plan (2018-2022) sets out as a goal the promotion of public-private partnerships in healthcare. As a result, an estimated 60 per cent of all healthcare services are provided by the private sector, amongst the largest shares in Sub-Saharan Africa.
According to the report which was presented in Lagos state over the weekend, this highly commercialised system has not been able to cope with the Covid-19 pandemic.
According to the report, Nigeria has a critical shortage of lifesaving equipment to treat acute cases of Covid-19, such as ventilators, oxygen, and qualified specialists.
“The country had only 500 ventilators in May 2020, against the 20,325 that would be needed to address the epidemic and only 0.17 intensive care unit (ICU) beds per 100.000 inhabitants. Unfortunately, this was to be expected.
“Healthcare services are severely underfunded: health spending as a share of general government expenditure decreased from 7.3 per cent in 2006 to as little as 4.4 per cent in 2018, below similar African states such as South Africa and Kenya, and far below the 15 per cent of their annual national budget to which the African Union States committed to in the Abuja Declaration.
“Access to testing for Covid-19 is largely dependent on a persons’ socioeconomic background. Even if testing for suspected Covid-19 cases is provided for free at government laboratories, there are only 84 public testing laboratories as of February 2022 for a population of over 200 million inhabitants.
“This is not enough, as evidenced by reports in the media that several public health facilities redirect suspected Covid-19 cases, including those with visible symptoms, to fee-paying laboratories due to lack of capacity and corruption, with charges as high as N50,400 ($132) per test.
“Some private providers also add extra fees for ‘logistics’, up to between N60,400 and N100,400 ($159 – $264) for a COVID-19 test, which is approximately two to three times more than the monthly minimum wage in Nigeria.”
The report also finds insufficient regulation and monitoring of private health providers.
It, therefore, recommended an increase in government funding to health by at least 15 per cent of the budget to meet the Abuja commitment and expand the availability of quality, well-coordinated public healthcare services, and a reversal of the current policies intended to encourage higher for-profit private sector engagement in healthcare.
The report equally task the government to ensure that all healthcare providers are strictly monitored and regulated at the federal, state, and local level, and also take concrete steps to ensure universal access to social healthcare insurance or another pre-pooled financing scheme.
