I HAVE NO HANDS IN LOCAL GOVT. ELECTIONS- Uduaghan. His Excellency, Dr. Emmanuel Uduaghan speaking on some topical issues lately. QUESTION Still on politics, sir When is the local government election in the state going to be? As far as the local government elections as concerned, I have done my part as the governor as regards the Delta State Independent Electoral Commission and my job ends there: The other part of it is the funding. They have made some requests and we are meeting up with their requests. The issue of the date will be fixed by the commission. I think they have a programmes on sensitization and they are going round now. I believe they have just finished and I have a feeling that they will soon put up the date. QUESTION Sir, I want to find out why teachers due for promotion since 2011 have not been promoted up till now? I will find out why they have not been promoted. I am not aware of that but let me say this; I don’t believe that promotion should be automatic. I believe that promotion should be based on merit. Now what teachers tend to do is that; they won’t teach, they will go to the market, some of them tend to be lousy because their promotion is automatic. I think we are reviewing that policy. Promotion, should be on performance and merit. If you are qualified to be promoted you should be promoted; so I will look into that. QUESTION Let us go to the health sector; one area you have expressed yourself is the human capital development, much more so because you are a medical doctor. A lot is being done, and Deltans are happy. Everybody has been applauding you even those that are grumbling. As you said, they also cannot take this away from you but Deltans have an issue with the programme. They want to ask, is it for all-comers or is it for Deltans because it appears that people from across the Niger come to our hospitals to deliver their babies because it is free; do we have a bias for Deltans or it is just free for all inhabitants of Delta? We want to hear from you. The programmes is primarily for Deltans and people who live in Delta State because once you live in Delta State, I think you are entitled to the programme. I am aware that people come from across the Niger to benefit from this programme. However, my conscience tells me that it will be wrong to tell them they cannot benefit from the programme. For a woman who has struggled to come from, maybe, across our bridge to be denied the benefit of getting that particular service, I don’t think it is right. For me, the number of people that come from across the Niger is so insignificant that it cannot kill us as a state, if we help them to benefit from the programme. That is what I have told the Ministry of Health to not be hard on them. If they have access to the hospitals, let them benefit from it. It won’t kill us. QUESTION Your Excellency, what are those structures that you put in place in the health sector especially in reducing, to a very large extent, the maternal and infant mortabity rates? What was the magic wand? The thing about the health sector is that there are three layers of services in the health sector: we have the primary healthcare, the secondary healthcare, we have the tertiary healthcare. We try to pay attention to these three levels of healthcare, but we have paid a lot of attention to the primary healthcare sector which I believe, if properly handled, can take care of the bulk of the people that require healthcare services; if we are able to deal with them at that level the number that is required in the secondary healthcare sector is reduced, that is the number that needs attention at the hospitals will be reduced and, of course, the number will reduce at the tertiary healthcare sector which are the specialists hospitals. So, in our primary healthcare programme through the state primary healthcare development agency, we are deeply involved in maternal healthcare centres, even the ones in the local government areas we are deeply involved in helping to build, equip and even support services in terms of staffing. Apart from that, we have primary healthcare programme too, especially in immunization where we deal with many of the diseases that affect children and are preventable. So, our immunization program is very robust and, apart from that the free access to the healthcare at various levels from the day of pregnancy to the five years which I believe is critical to the survival of the human being, that access and the fact that it is free made it possible for a lot more persons to benefit from hospital services. Beyond that, we also have our free rural healthcare service which, at a certain time of the year, we go to some communities and offer them health services free of charge, no matter the age, and no matter the kind of diseases. In fact if you see the pictures of some of the things they do in those places, some of the surgeries they do in those places you will be amazed at the success rate, people that had given up hope, they do the surgery, be it eye or, big abdominal masses they remove them and these are some of the things that we have done and at the grassroot level which has improved the life expectancy of the people of Delta State. QUESTION Your Excellency, lets look at the Delta State University Teaching Hospital. A lot of good jobs have been carried out there. A lot of things are going on there. But is the patronage at DELSUTH impressive? DELSUTH is over-subscribed . In fact right now, we are planning to add additional 300 beds because the work pressure there is becoming so much. One thing they tried to do was to reduce the bed occupancy, that is the number of days a patient stays in the hospital. You know the number of patients that go there now is so much, they are coming from everywhere. There is no time you go there that you will find a bed space some people have to queue for a long time, especially those that require surgery to get an available bed space that the surgery can be done. Requests for the services is very high.
Posted on: Tue, 15 Oct 2013 04:14:56 +0000
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