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Hajia Azara Bukari, the Director of Friends Maternity Clinic in Sawla, has appealed to the government to extend the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) coverage to include family planning services for women. She said in the past many women visited health facilities for family planning services to control their pregnancy but the introduction of the free maternity services under the NHIS had minimized the practice among women. Hajia Bukari made the appeal when the Sawla-Tuna-Kalba District NHIS took its turn in celebrating the 10th Anniversary of the NHIS under the theme: �Towards Universal Health Coverage; Increasing Enrolment while Ensuring Sustainability.� She said extending the NHIS to cover family planning services would not only help couples to plan their families well but would also prevent teenage pregnancies. Hajia Bukari spoke against the practice of patients visiting health facilities late in the evening when laboratory technicians had already closed from work and said this had to stop. She said said the practice was bad because patients needed to carry out some laboratory investigations to establish the true cause of the patients� ill health for appropriate and effective prescriptions to be made. She said visiting health facilities at wrong hours resulting in sometimes inappropriate prescriptions was partly the cause of why patients sometimes engage in �medical shopping� which also affects the operations of schemes. Mr. Mahama Sakara, the Sawla-Tuna-Kalba NHIS Manager, announce the introduction of capitation into the health insurance scheme, the establishment of a call centre and claims processing centers to address concerns of providers.