Nigeria is moving towards evidence-based decision-making in healthcare as the government seeks to ensure that limited public resources are directed towards interventions that provide measurable health benefits, Coordinating Minister of Health and Social Welfare, Prof. Muhammad Ali Pate, has said.
Pate made the remarks in Abuja while inaugurating the National Steering Committee on Health Technology Assessment (HTA), describing the institutionalisation of HTA as an important step in improving healthcare investment, strategic purchasing and health outcomes.
The minister said the approach would help policymakers make more transparent and objective decisions on the medicines, diagnostics, medical devices, procedures and other healthcare interventions that should receive public funding.
“We are moving from faith-based policies and programming to evidence-based,” Pate said.
He explained that Nigeria’s healthcare needs would continue to outpace available resources, even as the government works to expand health insurance coverage and mobilise additional funding.
As a result, he said, policymakers would have to make difficult choices about how available funds are allocated.
“Choices have to be made, especially when we are spending quite a modest amount per capita,” he said, noting that resource constraints also require prioritisation in countries with substantially higher healthcare spending.
HTA to guide healthcare spending
Pate said Health Technology Assessment would provide a systematic framework for evaluating healthcare interventions based on factors including clinical effectiveness, safety, affordability, cost-effectiveness, equity and broader effects on the health system.
He said Nigeria had sometimes adopted approaches from countries with substantially different economic conditions and health-system realities without producing enough evidence applicable to the Nigerian context.
“Without it, and I dare say that we have been flying blind,” he said.
According to the minister, the new framework would support the National Health Insurance Authority (NHIA), as well as federal and state governments, in making decisions about health insurance benefit packages, healthcare purchasing and investment.
Pate, however, clarified that HTA was not intended primarily as a cost-cutting mechanism or a means of limiting access to life-saving care.
Rather, he said, its purpose was to help ensure that scarce resources were directed towards interventions capable of delivering meaningful health outcomes and value for money.
The minister said prioritisation had become increasingly important as Nigeria contends with both communicable and non-communicable diseases, including growing challenges associated with conditions such as kidney disease and cancer.
Success to be measured by policy impact
Pate said the effectiveness of the HTA system should ultimately be judged by its influence on healthcare decisions rather than simply by the volume of research or reports generated.
“Our objective is to improve the decisions that we make. It should not become another academic exercise disconnected from policy and purchasing decisions,” he said.
The Director-General of the NHIA, Dr Kelechi Ohiri, said the authority had progressed from piloting HTA to making it an institutionalised part of Nigeria’s health financing framework.
The development comes as policymakers seek ways to improve healthcare purchasing and allocate limited resources amid competing health needs.
With the institutionalisation of HTA, decisions on healthcare financing are expected to increasingly draw on evidence about the effectiveness, affordability and wider impact of different interventions, rather than relying solely on established practice or external models.
