The Society for Family Health, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and government health agencies have urged that the achievements of the nine-year IntegratE Project be institutionalised to maintain and expand access to family planning services, organisers said at a dissemination meeting in Lagos.
Speaking at the event, Permanent Secretary of the Lagos State Primary Health Care Board, Dr Ibrahim Mustafa, said the project trained more than 904 community-based providers in Lagos and reached over 400,000 people. “Over 904 personnel or providers have been trained, and they have reached more than 400,000 people,” he said, according to the meeting report published by Vanguard Health.
Funded by the Gates Foundation and led by the Society for Family Health, IntegratE began in 2017 as a pilot in Lagos and Kaduna before expanding to nine additional states, the report said. Between 2017 and 2026, the project trained 863 community pharmacists and 4,961 Patent and Proprietary Medicine Vendors across 11 states, the organisers reported.
The project, the organisers said, broadened the range of contraceptive and primary care services available through community pharmacies and PPMV outlets. Mustafa and other speakers said training enabled community providers to offer specialised methods, including contraceptive implants and injectables, rather than mainly supplying pills and emergency contraceptives.
Project figures presented at the meeting showed that trained providers delivered family planning services to 1,756,170 women, including 399,766 new acceptors, and an estimated 117,775 unintended pregnancies were averted. The providers also attended to more than 1.18 million children under five, tested over 923,000 people for malaria and treated 682,601 confirmed malaria cases, in addition to treating many cases of diarrhoea and pneumonia, the report said.
Rodio Diallo, speaking for the Gates Foundation, said assessments indicated that women in lower-income communities often seek care from providers closest to them, and that equipping those community-level workers can improve reproductive health access. “The key learning is that if you give knowledge to healthcare workers and empower them, they will be better equipped to meet women’s reproductive health needs,” Diallo said.
Representing SFH, Emeka Okafor, Group Director, Donor Funded Portfolio, said sustainability would depend on bringing community-based providers into formal health information and referral systems. He urged that data generated by pharmacies and PPMVs be captured in the National Health Management Information System, particularly DHIS-II, adding that private-sector data are essential for planning. “If you’re a government and you’re taking a decision based on 40 per cent of the population, I’m not sure it’s a good decision,” Okafor said.
Registrar of the Pharmacy Council of Nigeria, Ibrahim Babashehu Ahmed, said the project informed the Council’s tiered accreditation framework, which helps classify community providers by capacity for regulation and quality assurance. The Lagos State health team also said it would examine lessons from IntegratE for possible incorporation into the state family planning programme, the meeting report added.
The dissemination meeting, themed “Sustaining Gains in Family Planning: Lessons from the IntegratE Project for Service Delivery, Referral Systems and Data Management,” brought together regulators, government officials, development partners and healthcare stakeholders, the report said.
Featured image: Sea Cow via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
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