Osun State Health Insurance Scheme (OHIS), on Thursday, disclosed its readiness to enrol and register all pregnant women in the state into the scheme to pay more attention to them during the pregnancy period, adding that the agency will also enrol people living with disabilities (PWDs).
Executive Secretary of the scheme, Dr Razaq Akindele, who stated this at the Osun state Correspondent Chapel of the NUJ programme tagged: “News Point” in Osogbo, affirmed that the registration is important because “pregnancy is something you must pay attention to and after nine months everybody should be happy after pregnancy.”
“We have put that to the governor and we are waiting for approval to get all pregnant women enrolled to get free treatment.”
According to him, “The total enrollees in the formal sector is 244,000 and it is likely to increase when the governor starts employing the way he has promised while in the informal sector, we have 13,462 enrollees. What we met on the ground was little less than 4,000. And our aim is to capture nothing less than 6 percent of the people who are living in Osun State.”
“We are coping with the little resources we have in OSHIA and at any time we are running out of funds and we have to get some succour from the governor”.
“Just recently, some government hospitals were complaining about equipment to perform better, we went to the governor and about 3 months ago, we gave equipment to more than N200 million to all government hospitals free of charge. Mr. Governor is always ready to support us especially when it comes to issues of health.
“There are some funds we reserve for catastrophic medical conditions and since I came to office, we have not done less than 25 of such. We have reservations for catastrophic medical conditions when it comes.
“The administration of Governor Adeleke has been responding appropriately. There is no time we take anything to him on health that he will not respond to us appropriately. He has been doing wonderfully well and we are already starting the discussion with the people living with disabilities to enrol them in OHIS also.
“We will be training nurses, social workers that are in various government hospitals on how to interpret signs so that at a particular time that any deaf or dumb woman comes to their hospitals, somebody will be there to interpret the signs to the doctor and the nurses to get adequate health that is in the pipeline.
“Despite all our campaigns, people still don’t understand the benefits of the Health Insurance scheme”, he stated.