By Justina Auta
The House of Representatives Committee on Specialty Healthcare, on Thursday pledged their support to advocate for increased budgetary allocation to improve blood service delivery in the country.
Lawan Ali-Shettima, Deputy Chairman of the committee made this known, when he led some members on an oversight visit and roundtable discussion with the management of the National Blood Service Commission (NBSC), in Abuja.
Ali-Shettima explained that the visit was to discuss critical issues, especially their challenges with a view to address them and improve access to safe and quality blood service and products to the public.
“We are looking at the way people are willingly and voluntarily coming to donate blood in this establishment.
“So, I believe with support they will acquire more equipment, more facilities to expand their offices to zonal levels.
“This is what we are suggesting. So we will do our best to see that legislatively we intervene by providing more means of funding for them to get more equipment,” he said.
On his part, Prof. Saleh Yuguda, Director General, NBSC noted the challenges of inadequate funding, which had affected their operations and access to safe blood services across the country.
Yuguda explained that with more funding, the commission would be able to ensure access to safe and affordable blood components to carter for the needs of the over 200 million Nigeria population.
“The major challenges we have across the country is that of equipment and other infrastructure in most of our centres, which are very old.
“So we are trying to see if they we can liase with the National Assembly to come to our aid, so that we can get more funding for the commission.
“I believe that with their support, we will be able to achieve that,” he said.
The NBSC boss, while noting the scarcity of blood during emergency situations, which had led to several deaths, encouraged the public to regularly and voluntarily donate blood to save more lives.
The NBSC relies on a pool of regular donations by voluntary, unpaid blood donors and currently collects and screens approximately 25,000 units of blood from voluntary unpaid donors annually.
Currently, less than 5 per cent of the total blood donation is sourced from voluntary donors in Nigeria, and the rest are commercially, subjecting recipients to the risk of infections such as HIV, hepatitis B, Hepatitis C, syphilis and others.
Nationally, an estimated 1,230,000 units of blood are collected across several facilities each year, 90 per cent of which are from paid commercial donors. NAN
