BY BUKOLA BARDI
The National Health Insurance Scheme, NHIS has threatened To delist the Ondo state owned teaching hospital from its Health management organisations, HMO Over poor Service delivery.
The new Coordinator of the scheme in the state, Dr Adebiyi Adebisi made this known when he led his team on an enlightenment visit to POSITIVE FM and NTA AKURE.
Enrolees of National Health Insurance Scheme(NHIS) had last year shut down the clinic of the scheme at the Teaching Hospital, prostesting poor service delivery by the management of the hospital.
The angry protesters also paralysed activities at the clinic as staff of the clinic were chased out.
The protesters who were led by a Director, federal scholarship board , Mr Michael Ogunwale lamented that for almost one year ,the NHIS clinic at the UNIMED hospital had been maltreating all its enrollees .
Similarly, the ongoing doctors strike in the state had paralyzed activities at the hospital, making it more difficult for NHIS enrollees to get health care from the clinic.
Dr Adebisi while addressing enrolees at NTA and Positive fm Akure said the scheme had truly been bombarded with series of complaints enrolees with the medical facility.
He explained that the complaints ranged from lack of quality drugs to lackadaisical attitude by staff of the hospital.
“Our aim is to do things in the right direction and right way. That is why we are doing internal restructuring on our own part and things are changing gradually.
By next months ,some new staff will be redeployed to the state, especially medical professionals because that is one of the problems we had in the scheme from inception.
This is a way of improving on the services of all the health care providers in the state. We are also trying to change to electronic operations as a scheme and we have started the process and by the end of the year, NHIS will be fully ICT driven so that when you send us an information, we will respond in real time.
Dr. Adebisi urged enrolees to always direct complaints about service providers to NHIS, assuring them of prompt response.
He also announced that the scheme was working in collaboration with some pharmaceutical companies for the production of quality drugs to address allegation of low quality drugs against some HMO
“one of the things we are trying to correct is the complaints by our enrollees about the quality of drugs they get. we are trying to find a way on how we can manufacture our own drugs, As in, working with pharmaceutical companies to produce drugs specifically for NHIS.
We will also make sure that those of our drugs will be sent to the hospitals and be rest assured that drugs taken to our hospitals are of good quality.
We are working on that and hopefully by January next year, that programme will kick off. By January, our drugs with NHIS logo at the conner of the drugs will be out” Adebisi said.
Speaking earlier, the General manager of NTA Akure, Mr Segun Ojelade advised management of the scheme to work towards regaining enrolees trust which had been lost due to poor services.
The general manager of Positive fm Akure, Mr Tunde Abiodun urged NHIS to be more responsive to the plights of enrolees So that more nigerians would be encouraged to entrust the scheme with their health.
There was question and answer session during which the NHIS state coordinator Dr Adebisi cleared some Gray areas.