By Asma’u Ahmad
The Partnership for Advocacy in Child and Family Health (PACFaH) has urged Community Pharmacists and Patent Proprietary Medicine Vendors (PPMVs) to tackle the country’s maternal mortality rate.
Programme Director, Strategy of the Pharmaceutical Society of Nigeria (PSN)-PACFaH, Mr. Remi Adeseun, made the call during an advocacy visit to the Registrar, Pharmacists Council of Nigeria (PCN) in Abuja.
He regretted that Nigeria contributed 15 per cent of global maternal deaths with about 111 women and girls dying daily due to preventable pregnancies and child birth related complications. Mr. Adeseun attributed what he described as “unacceptable and preventable maternal mortality rate” to high unintended pregnancies, socio-economic factors and low use of modern contraceptives.
Mr. Remi Adeseun
According to him, this rate can be drastically reduced through increased access and uptake of modern Family Planning commodities and services. Mr. Adeseun noted that the private sector was servicing 60 per cent of Nigerians demanding FP commodities. He explained that 38 per cent of FP users patronise the PPMVs while 10 per cent patronise community pharmacists which included doctors and nurses.
“Giving the distribution above, there is urgent need to support CPs and PPMVs to provide more primary health care services especially family planning to approximately 50 per cent of the population that patronised them.
“Solution to ending maternal mortality rate is to utilise the channel that the people are already going for other things which is CPs and PPMVs `One Stop Shop’ for Primary Health Care need,” he said. The programme director underscored the need to ensure that people managing those centres were trained to provide FP services and others.
He said that it would also improve low contraceptive prevalence rate of 15 per cent as well as infant and child mortality figures. Adeseun said the purpose of the advocacy was to request for the council’s approval and nominate staff that would undergo refresher capacity building on FP and other primary health care services.
Responding, the PCN Registrar, Mr. Elijah Mohammed, assured them of the council’s collaboration. He said such collaboration should include deployment of more staff to those areas within the shortest possible time. According to him, such measures will go a long way in assisting grassroots practitioners to address some of the challenges they might encounter in the course of carrying out their duties.
