Driving Equitable Access to Healthcare for NCD Sufferers in Nigeria through a Legal Informatics Approach

Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs) accounts for 70% of the deaths resulting from health challenges annually across the globe. This paper discusses the provisions of local legislations and policies in Nigeria with particular emphasis on the financing available to persons with NCDs. Of particular concern are those legislations and policies that seem to protect persons with such diseases as to their fundamental right to dignity and health. This paper adopts a mix of qualitative and sociotechnical approaches and explores the vital legal, policy, and government project implementation documents in a bid to identifying the barriers to implementation of policies, highlight the costs of social exclusion of the rights of sufferers in human and economic terms. Following a careful analysis a legal informatics single window model of care is constructed to demonstrate how NCD sufferers may be taken care of with recourse to the subsisting laws and how any breach of the rights of the sufferers could be tracked and remedied. It is believed that such approach would ameliorate the health financing burdens of present and future NCD sufferers among the citizenry.