The Lagos State Health Management Agency, LASHMA, has so far registered an estimated 756,000 residents in the state, even as the agency is seeking innovative ways to support providers in ensuring that their services are upgraded without worries over inflation.
Disclosing this at the agency’s first annual Ilera Eko forum themed: “The Brighter Future”, the General Manager of LASHMA, Dr Emmanuella Zamba, said LASHMA was committed to advancing the quality of healthcare delivery to residents of the state.
Zamba said, “The beauty of health insurance is that it takes human side financing, which is people’s money to provide healthcare. What that means is that every month, a fixed amount goes into the facility from every person that is enrolled.
“The hospital has a guaranteed income which they can use to not only provide care but to also increase the quality of their facilities.
“Insurance, the way we are implementing it is that we not only use the public facilities but we also use the private facilities.
“It’s a combination of both public and private facilities in Lagos State. Whatever we are doing on the public side, we are also doing to support the private side. Those are things that we are looking at with regard to providers’ management.
She explained that providers will now have the opportunity to enroll people into their facilities.
“We can support them to have sensitisation exercises in their localities, so we help them to increase the number of people who come their way because that increases the funding that is coming to them.”
Zamba said the forum was conceived with the aim of providing a platform for healthcare providers to share ideas, policies and strategies that would help improve access and standard healthcare, stressing that LASHMA wants the ilera Eko scheme to be sustainable and successful.
Speaking on the scheme, Lagos State Commissioner for Health, Professor Akin Abayomi, represented by the Permanent Secretary, Health, Dr Olusegun Ogboye, said, “The plan is not only for the vulnerable, it is for anybody that is willing to pay for it. Infact, it is now compulsory to get health insurance but for the vulnerables, we don’t want to leave them behind. It will be terrible to leave people just because they can’t afford it.
“It is a forum that allows for interaction between LASHMA and providers. It is an opportunity for providers to feed LASHMA about the challenges they are having in providing services, and for LASHMA to also feed them back about their findings.
“The insurance holders will not continue to pay for insurance if they are not happy with the quality of service, and that would also also affect the quality of healthcare that they get when they get to these centres.”
