By Maureen Nwine and Esther Edebor
The Management of Edo State Health Insurance Scheme (EDOHIS) has started to enrol Special Advisers (SAs) and Senior Special Advisers (SSA) in Edo State South Senatorial District as part of its ongoing mobile enrollment and enlightenment campaign.
The event witnessed a large turnout of political appointees from the district and was a follow-up on the meeting between the representatives of the political appointees’ and the management of the Scheme that took place at the Commission’s headquarters earlier in the year.
Addressing the political appointees, the director of ICT, EDOHIS, Mr. Efemwenkiekie Nesta, announced that the mandate is to cover all Edo residents, regardless of class, and that the Commission has accredited facilities (private and public hospitals), and leverages on technology to provide high-quality medical care to Edo residents.
Signed into law by the Obaseki administration, Mr. Efemwenkiekie said the scheme seeks to proffer a final solution to the deteriorating health standards of people caused primarily by the inability of residents to afford proper medical care. He also said the Health Insurance Scheme is funded by the Consolidated Statutory Funding from both the Federal and the State Governments, which makes it easy to access healthcare, especially in cases of emergency.
Efemwenkiekie explained that Health Insurance is an open purse where enrollees and the Government collectively contribute to a common purse to cover the hospital bills of enrollees and the vulnerable in the event of ill health.
So far, the EdoHIS has enrolled over 70,000 Edo residents who continue to get high-quality healthcare for a payment of 10% of the real medical costs since the scheme went live in 2019. The Business Development Director, Mr. Efosa Oyegun who disclosed this said ‘’the program offers a full range of medical services to the people of Edo, including preventive, consulting, general practice, outpatient admissions, maternal, neonatal, and reproductive health, minor surgical procedures, laboratory, radiological, physiotherapy, pharmacies, emergencies, paediatrics, obstetrics & gynaecology, primary eye, and dental care, among other services’’.
Speaking further, he revealed that “the commission’s monitoring team makes ad hoc inspections of the various facilities to make sure that the agreed-upon standards of services are upheld in order to ensure that enrollees receive excellent care from the facilities that are assigned to them’’.
The enrollment outreach was held at the John Odigie-Oyegun Public service Academy (JOOPSA) as one of the several outreach programs of the EDOHIS to ensure that Edo residents understand the importance of health insurance and fully key into it.
