Revisiting public health programming in Nigeria: challenges and solutions

Abstract

Obinna Ositadimma Oleribe,1 Okey Nwanyanwu,2 Eric Yi-Liang Shen,3 Simon D Taylor-Robinson41Excellence and Friends Management Care Centre (EFMC), Abuja, Nigeria; 2Global Health Services Network, Farmington, MI, USA; 3Department of Radiation Oncology, Chang Gung Memorial Hospital and Chang Gung University, Taoyuan 333, Taiwan; 4Faculty of Medicine, Imperial College London, London W2 1PG, UKAbstract: Public health programming has three main components – capacity development, service provision and documentation with monitoring. However, most funders and programmers now focus on just documentation and monitoring. In this communication, the authors extensively discuss the need for the full complement of public health programming and why it is important to restructure supportive site visits to make them both empowering and impactful to the health care workers resulting in higher quality of public health services and documentation with monitoring. The authors are of the view that following problem identification, comprehensive capacity development of field workers will engender quality service provision and appropriate documentation and monitoring.Keywords: programming, supervisory site visits (SSVs), capacity developmen