By Taofeek Lawal, Abuja
No fewer than 44 Health Care providers in Abuja, are presently undergoing a six-week intensive training programme on Family Planning/Long Acting Reversible Contraceptives (FP/LARCs) in the Federal Capital Territory(FCT) School of Nursing/Midwifery, Gwagwalada.
Declaring the training programme open, the Acting Secretary Health and Human Services Secretariat (HHSS), Dr. Mohammed Kawu, said the training aims to improve participants’ capacity in providing qualitative healthcare services in various hospitals in the FCT.
Kawu, who was represented by the Director, Medical and Diagnostic of the HHSS, Dr Abubakar Ahmadu of the Health Secretariat, said the training programme is holding in the FCT for the first time.
He said, “The purpose of this training programme is to improve on our healthcare services to the people. The FCT Administration is hoping the trainees will afford themselves the opportunity to learn and improve on the knowledge they have acquired, to enable them apply same to provide a qualitative healthcare services to our people.”
With the training programme he said there will be qualitative healthcare services in hospitals as well as drastic reduction in maternal mortality ratio in the country.
Speaking earlier on the future of family planning in FCT, the Acting Director Nursing, Mrs. Grace Musa Leo, noted the need for sustainability of strategic policies and engagement with stakeholders in the healthcare field.
According to her, sustaining health outcomes through the private sector plus has the strategic objectives of improving access to voluntary and rights based family planning services, increase capacity of public and private health care providers to deliver quality family planning services with and emphasis on LARCS by public and private Health Care services providers in FCT.
“As at April 2018 only 44 facilities in FCT were offering Family Planning services and only 1,745 women were accessing the care, but by December 2019 over 183 facilities were offering Family Planning services, and over 2,556 women were accessing care. This is as a result that FCT school of Nursing/midwifery have trained two masters and 15 state level trainers supported training the educators in the school on FP/LARCs,” Musa Leo stated.