All is indeed not well with Primary Health Care (PHC) Centres spread across Taraba, the state that prides itself as the ‘Nature’s Gift to the Nation’.
From Pamanga, Borno-Krukru, Kankani communities in Bali local government council, to Garin-Jatau, Lagos Buban, Wasaji as well as Fada in Donga and Ardo-Kola councils, and many other communities spread across the state, PHCs, which ought to be the cornerstone of essential healthcare, as observed by The Guardian, are cap in hands struggling for survival.

Recent visits to some facilities spread across Ardo-Kola, Bali and Dongo councils, showed that the PHCs are not functioning as expected due to the challenges of dilapidated structures, lack of resources, staffing, paucity of fund, poor infrastructure, lack of essential drug supply, sparse distribution to mention but just a few.

The PHCs, which are not only in bad shape, at the time of filing this report, are also finding it cumbersome to provide the required comprehensive healthcare service to the people, the situation which our correspondent noticed to have begun to impact negatively on the maternal and child healthcare service delivery.

Apart from the Community Health Extension Workers (CHEWs) and students on practical who are managing the various health facilities visited, dreams of patients patronising the Centres having the opportunity to be examined by qualified doctors, have turned out to be a mirage, as some of the facilities as gathered by The Guardian, have never for once played host to doctors since their establishment several years ago.

A health worker who claimed to have been working for several in one of the facilities visited told The Guardian: “No doctor had ever visited this facility since I have been working in this facility for the past ten years.”

Reeling out the challenges bedevilling the PHC, the health worker who claimed that the situation of the PHCs is getting worse on daily basis, said: “Apart from the absences of doctors, and lack of pharmacy that is weighing us down, the inability of the state government to renovate this hospital by equipping it with befitting medical facilities, have also become a source of concern to us and the community.”

Taking her time to conduct our reporter round the facility which lizards, rats and other reptiles are now taking advantage of, she said: “The inability of the government to supply us with the necessary medical equipment, have forced us to go for locally made hospital beds for our patients.”

Locally made hospital beds were observed to have taken over all the available dilapidated spaces in most of the ward of the facilities visited across rural communities in the aforementioned councils.

Where the locally made hospital beds are not enough, some patients, as noticed by our state correspondent, went as far as lying on wrappers spread on the bare floor by their relatives.

Some patients on admission as well as their relatives, who also aligned their weights to those of the health workers, vehemently lamented the constant struggles they always had with lizards, rats and snakes in the hospital wards.

A patient, simply identified as Halimatu Jubrila, who pointed at the various dilapidated ceilings and the leaking roofs in the facility, said: “These cracks on the walls does not only provide shelters for the lizards, but they often jump on our beds especially when we are sleeping.”

Citing the amount of water that often penetrates the dilapidated roofs whenever it rains, the situation, according to her uncle, who gave his name as Usman, “sometimes worsened our patients’ sickness.”

A senior staff of one of the local government councils, who was of the view that primary healthcare centres were established for the sole purpose of bringing healthcare services to the doorsteps of the people domiciling in rural areas, felt sad that the reverse has turned out to be the case in Taraba.

“I must confess to you that our state is far behind in every sphere of development. When all our top government functionaries and their family members derive joy in accessing treatment outside this state, how can they know what our PHCs are going through,” he lamented.

The local government staff, who craved anonymity, beckoned to the incumbent state governor, Dr. Agbu Kefas, not to tread the paths of his predecessors, who according to him “failed to make our health sector one of their major priorities.”

Also, not comfortable with the deplorable conditions of the PHCs in her ward, 36 years Abigail Sani, who took our correspondent down the memory lane on how she lost her two children to preventable diseases in one of the facilities, urged the government to as a matter of urgency insert the right peg in the right hole in order to reduce the prevalence rate of maternal mortality in PHCs spread across the councils and the state at large.

When reached for clarification, the Executive Secretary of the State Primary Health Care Development Agency (TSPHCDA), Dr. Tukura Nyigwa, who admitted that the agency is saddled with the responsibility of coordinating all the PHCs in the state said “most of the states of the PHCs, honestly, they are dilapidated and in a sorry state.”

The PHCs, “in terms of the infrastructures, in terms of human resources for health, and also in terms of the commodities,” he said, are in sorry states.

Apportioning blame on the past administrations, the decision of the incumbent state government to collaborate with the federal government in some midwives, he believed will go a long way in addressing parts of the challenges.

The Executive Secretary who also announced that the state has the highest maternal mortality in the country, said the present state government has also engaged additional Community Health Extension Workers (CHEWs).

The need for the state government to further tread extra legitimate miles to “engage more technical manpower, in the PHCs, he believed can no longer be overemphasised.

Adding that: “We hope the present government will look into the direction and see that we address most of these challenges.”

On his part, the Commissioner of Health, Dr. Bodiya Buma, said the present government, in the state, is working round the clock to address all the challenges bedevilling the health sector.

•This story was produced for the Frontline investigative program, and supported by Africa Data Hub and Orodata Science.