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The Staff Clinic at the State Secretariat, Agodi, Ibadan now operates from 8am to 7pm daily courtesy of the Oyo State Health Insurance Agency (OYSHIA).
The agency renovated the clinic earlier in the year to enable it offer quality medical service to civil and public servants. Facilities at the clinic had decayed over the years due to poor funding. But the renovated clinic was recommissioned in May by Governor Seyi Makinde, signaling that full life has returned to public facility.
However, some enrollees who now visit the clinic raised a concern about the quality of the service received there.
Explaining the reason for the challenge, OYSHIA Executive Secretary Dr Sola Akande said it was not abnormal to experience such teething problems due to the complexity of operation under the health insurance scheme
He said: “When you are starting, there will be some shaking but what is important is projection and gradually we are getting there because for that place to be self-sustainable, we must have nothing less than 3,000 enrollees and that is where we are going and staff clinic is now working Monday to Sunday and closes at 7pm. There are now doctors and nurses ready to attend to you which was not the case before the governor commissioned the place.
“Gradually, we are moving on and that leads me to three points.
“All over the world, health insurance is about three things. First, the pool, the benefit package and the people.
“Health insurance is about how much you can put together and how much is the money people have contributed to the pool. Every life and group in the society and country at large puts money together in small amounts into that pool and it means that I am planning to enrich the benefit package, I am planning to increase the number of lives covered. There is nowhere in the world that you can have an health insurance that will say I am taking care of all the diseases. The U.K. is trying to do that but they are having problem with the waiting time.
“They will say because you are a tax payer, you have access to health insurance but the challenge is that you might not be able to access it until three years because by law you are supposed to have access but in practical terms, you don’t have and all over the world there is no scheme that will take care of everybody but we begin to make provision for everybody where your pool begins to get enlarged
“In Oyo State it is N8,000 for everybody whether you are in formal or informal sector, rich or poor. It is N28,000 for family plan – father, mother and two children. They are the ways we are enriching our pool. Lastly, people with pre-existing illness will be put on the scheme for the period of 3-5 years which means they will be paying N8,000 for 3-5 years.
“Another way of enriching the pool is adoption model. People that are wealthy can put certain amount of money into the pool and one of the goals of any health insurance regulatory body is to enlarge your pool.”
Akande explained that the fact that the clinic is meant for all civil servants make them feel entitled though most of them are not registered at the clinic under OYSHIA. He added that the staff at the clinic are also undergoing training to enable them to be more effective in handling the complexity of the clinic’s operation under OYSHIA. He urged enrollees who had unpleasant experience to be patient, stressing that services are being improved already.
His words: “There are problem and issues when you have new facility. There will be a lot of people trying those facilities out and I believe we will see more of that especially when the Oyo State Government completes the 300 facilities they are renovating now. It will lead to a lot of relief from our tertiary hospitals especially the UCH because when you have facilities that are new with equipment and manpower, there will be a lot of people that want to go in there.
At our clinic at the secretariat, we have a lot of civil servants that want to go in there and receive care in which most of them are not the primary enrollee of that particular area and for OYSHIA, it is a good problem and we are training the workers because we just accredited that facility, it was not part of our originally accredited facility so the workers have to go through some certain level of training.”