Gbokoson online medical consultant

COMMUNIQUE ISSUED AT THE END OF THE MEETING BETWEEN COMMUNITY HEALTH PRACTITIONERS REGISTRATION BOARD OF NIGERIA AND HEADS OF COMMUNITY HEALTH TRAINING INSTITUTIONS HELD ON WEDNESSDAY 19TH JANUARY, 2022 AT KENEM SUITE HOTELS LTD. UTAKO, ABUJA

Preamble:

The congress uses this medium to appreciate the President, Commander in-chief of the Armed forces of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, President Muhammadu Buhari and the Ministers of Health, Federal republic of Nigeria for their support for the Community Health Practitioners Registration Board of Nigeria under the leadership of Sule Galadima Toma, Chairman Governing Board and Bashir Idris, Registrar/CEO Community Health Practitioners Registration Board of Nigeria.

The congress also wishes to appreciate the Board for organizing and sustaining this annual gathering, and its effort towards total transformation in the following areas:

i. Successful conduct of 2021 CHPRBN National Examination and timely release of the results.

ii. Reduction in examination malpractices to the barest minimum by introducing security measures that checkmated examination malpractices.

iii. Digitalizing the Board’s services e.g., indexing, licensing and other registration processes.

iv. Commencement of Bachelor’s degree in Community Health Science by Universities in Nigeria.

v. Establishment of additional department (Planning, Research, Monitoring and Evaluation) and recorded history for development of first strategic plan and operational plan.

vi. Establishing an additional Primary Health Care Tutors training center (UNTH Enugu), and introducing new modalities for admission into PHC Tutors programme.

vii. Collaboration and working on modalities with relevant stakeholders to transform PHC Tutors Programme to B.Ed. in PHC education.



Resolutions:

The participants unanimously agreed on the following resolutions:

i. Based on the Board’s position on upward services fees review, the congress approved the review after the detailed expenditure was presented to the congress by the Registrar/CEO. They humbly appealed to the Board for period of extension in respect to 2021/2022 indexing and verification exercise.

ii. That the Board should also re-schedule the E-learning training as appropriate.

iii. The Board should sustain the conduct of two stream of examinations i.e., March for Resit examination and August/September for fresh/regular examinations.

iv. That during the conduct of National Professional Examination supervisors assigned should be a Community Health Practitioners base on level of experiences and seniority.

v. Board should strengthen its communication with training institutions as most appropriate.

vi. PHC Tutors should NOT be allowed to engage in teaching services with more than 2 training institutions i.e., as permanent Staff in one institution and as part-time in another institution.

vii. The board should strengthen the regulation of the practice of Primary Health Care Tutors.

viii. Any training institution caught engaging in illegal affiliation and/or running satellite campus should appropriately be sanctioned.

ix. That quarterly supportive supervision should be instituted by all Zonal Technical Officers.

x. That the Community Health training manual and standard of practice should appropriately be reviewed.

xi. The accreditation criteria and checklist be reviewed upwardly to meet present reality.

Conclusion:

The Committee appreciates the entire gathering for the opportunity given to serve as members of communiqué drafting committee.

Counter Signed:

Bashir Idris Sule Galadima Toma

Registrar/CEO CHPRBN Chairman CHPRBN

The list of online health providers is long, and several players have attracted massive investments from investors. Online consultations have the potential to be an essential part of the healthcare delivery model in India for the following reasons. First, in India, statistically speaking, there is one specialist doctor for every 10,000 patients. In addition to that, over 90% of the specialist doctors are practising in the top 10 cities of India which makes it difficult for the users in the semi-urban and rural parts to get easy access to them. With the use of technology, online consultations allow users from various parts of India to consult specialist doctors from the comfort of their home. As per the statistics by DocsApp, India’s leading online healthcare platform, over 50% of the users are from the rural parts of India.

Second, online doctor consultations bridge the geographical gap between the patients living in the below tier 2 parts of India and specialist doctors practising in the urban parts of India. It allows the doctors to increase their efficiency as they can consult more patients in less time with the help of technology via online consultations.

Third, anyone who wants to consult a specialist can do so without wasting time and energy on travelling to the clinic and waiting in queues for the consultation.

“A person suffering from depression wouldn't want to confront a counsellor face to face and also keep his identity private. Online consultations allow the user to consult a doctor while maintaining their privacy. As many patients in sensitive cases do not prefer face to face consultations, online doctor consultations give them easy access to doctors and make it convenient for them to prioritise their health and privacy simultaneously. Online consultations are beneficial for people who want specialist doctor’s advice and second opinions on various health conditions like cancer, diabetes, arthritis, cardiac ailments,” Satish Kannan, CEO of Docs App, which aims to be the largest online hospital by the end of 2018.

Although examples of e-Health can be found as early as the 1960s with the use of telemetry to monitor astronauts in the NASA program, the growth of e-Health in the last decade is a direct result of the increasing pervasiveness of internet use, advances in technology, and increasing patient involvement in medical decision making and self-management of care.

“As the concept of online consultations is relatively new, one of the initial problems that we face in the online consultation space is difficulty in building trust and confidence among the users. Many patients are still convinced every health problem needs a physical consultation with a doctor and are unaware that thousands of people are getting treated every day via online consultations. In addition to that, since only 70% of the cases can be treated online, it restricts the scope of treatment for certain cases. Even in the cases that cannot be treated online, talking to a doctor online can help them get a second opinion, understand the severity of the problem and receive proper guidance from the doctors for the necessary measures that need to be undertaken,” adds Kannan.

The Quest to Clean up Online Healthcare
The effective, large-scale deployment of e-Health activities must also consider several medico-legal, financial, and technical issues. These issues range from the primary identification of which e-Health activities are most beneficial to physicians and patients to the identification of standards for managing the secure, private, and accurate transmission of personal health information across a networked community. The need for such rules and regulations was starkly apparent to consumers and lawmakers around the world when a doctor couple was booked for homicide for digital consultation. The Bombay High Court recently made some sharp observations while hearing a case of medical negligence wherein a doctor couple, Deepa and Sanjeev Pawaskar were booked under Section 304 (culpable homicide not amounting to murder) of the Code of Criminal Procedure after a woman died within a few days of being discharged from their hospital.