Journal des soins infirmiers et des soins

Generating Strategies for Strengthening Health Systems through Community Participation

Abstract

Vitalis Chukwuemeka Echebiri

This paper examines the challenges facing health systems, and hypothesizes community participation as a panacea toward tackling them. Health systems are constrained by many internal and external problems such as human resources, financing, drugs, supply system, information use and generation, overall policy environment, political instability and the quality of governance, prompting health agencies to adopt various approaches toward tackling them. This includes adopting service-specific or disease-specific programs. Despite these approaches, a lot of health systems have remained too fragile to cope with the rising challenges of global health. Some measures that can be harnessed to deal with the internal problems have been proposed, but regrettably, the external factors cannot be easily controlled, but with a well laid down autonomous structure for the health systems, their effects can be significantly reduced. Altogether, community participation in driving the machinery of these health systems offers promising prospects toward strengthening them