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.”