Nigeria is considering adopting Universal Health Coverage (UHC) as an official policy target to ensure access to quality health care services for her population without financial hardship. To facilitate discussion on the topic, the President of Nigeria convened a UHC summit in March 2014 to discuss Nigeria's options and strategies to achieve UHC. A strategy for achieving UHC requires analysis of the available infrastructure to deliver the services. In this article, the geographic and sectoral distribution of health facilities in Nigeria is reviewed and implications on the UHC strategy selected are discussed.
The distribution of health facilities across Nigeria is nonuniform. As such, a UHC strategy must be responsive to the variation in health facility distribution across the country. Additional investments are needed in some parts of the country to improve access to tertiary health facilities and leverage private sector capacity.
Authors: Olusesan Ayodeji Makinde, Abayomi Sule, Olayinka Ayankogbe, David Boone, 2018
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