By Stanley Onyekwere
No fewer than forty-four (44) Health Care providers in Abuja, the nation’s capital are undergoing a six-week intensive training programme on Family Planning/Long Acting Reversible Contraceptives (FP/LARCs) in the FCT School of Nursing/Midwifery, Gwagwalada.
Declaring the training programme open, the Ag. Secretary Health and Human Services Secretariat (HHSS) Dr. Mohammed Kawu said it aims to improving capacity of participants in providing qualitative healthcare services in their verious hospitals in FCT.
Kawu, who was represented by the Director, Medical and Diagnostic of the HHSS, Dr Abubakar Ahmadu of the Health Secretariat, noted training programme is a maiden edition of it’s kind in FCT
He said: “The purpose of this very training programme is to have improvement to our healthcare services to our people.
“The FCT Administration is hoping the trainees will afford themselves the opportunity to learn and improve on the knowledge they have acquired, to enable them apply same to provide a qualitative healthcare services to our people.”
According to him, with the training programme, there will be qualitative healthcare services in hospitals as well as drastic reduction in maternal mortality ratio in the country.
Speaking earlier on the future of family planning in FCT, the Ag. Director Nursing, Mrs. Grace Musa Leo noted the need for sustainability of strategic policies and engagement with stakeholders in the healthcare field.
She said sustaining health outcomes through the private sector plus has the strategic objectives of improving access to voluntary and rights based Family Planning services, increase capacity of public and private health care providers to deliver quality family planning services with and emphasis on LARCS by public and private Health Care services providers in FCT.
According to her, “As at April 2018 only 44 facilities in FCT were offering Family Planning services and only 1,745 women were accessing the care, but by December 2019 over 183 facilities were offering Family Planning services, and over 2,556 women were accessing care.
“This is as a result that FCT school of Nursing/midwifery have trained two masters and 15 state level trainers supported training the educators in the school on FP/LARCs.”
Also, several good will massages from the state family planning coordinator, Mrs Eniola Awoniyi, the Chairman NANNM FCT SON/M comrd. Deborah Yusuf represented by Almond Macbun HHSS was commended for organising such a training programme for the healthcare services providers in the Territory.

