Categories of Health Facilities

The Municipality currently has four key types of health facilities namely Hospital, Health Centres/ Health Post and others. These categories are also placed under the broad headings of government, quasi-government, mission and private. At the moment there are a total of 16 health facilities made up of 3 hospitals, 2 Health Centres/ Post and 11 other low hierarchy facilities such as clinics etc.

 A health centre and reproductive and child health clinics are available to provide clinical/ preventive service in the Municipality which are found within the ranges of out-patient and in-patient, public health services; reproductive and child health services, nutrition, pharmacy, laboratory and X-Ray). There are also specialist hospitals such as the Family Health, Manna Mission and Lister Hospitals which provide obstetric and gynecological procedures as well as catering services.

 A further analysis reveals that provision of health facilities is shared between private, mission and governmental institutions. This is reflected in the table below where 12.5% of health facilities are governmental while mission and private caters for 6.3% and 81.3% respectively. The high participation of the private sector in health delivery is encouraging and policies should therefore be developed to enhance their performance.

Major Concerns of the Health Sector

• The health sector of the Municipality is confronted with institutional challenges such as
• Continuous attrition of health staff, especially nurses.
• Inadequate capacity and capability of the various health facilities
• Inadequate level of health infrastructure

Prevalence of priority diseases such as Malaria, Tuberculosis etc

The above institutional challenges are manifested in the prevalence of various communicable diseases such as Malaria, Hypertension, Skin Diseases, Diarrhea and Anaemia. These diseases are due to poverty, environmental sanitation, apathy and ignorance.

The abnormally high incidence of Malaria attests to issues relating to poor environmental sanitation in the Municipality which should be a matter of concerned among city managers if the Municipality is to make any headway in addressing such an important health issue. Appropriate policies in this regard are therefore imperative to address this issue.

Performance of the Natural Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS)

The key challenges confronting the Municipality under the NHIS include;

Inadequate office space

The use of health facility attendance cards which compel clients to throng the various offices in search of their cards thereby creating inconvenience at the Municipal NHIS Offices.