Abia State Primary Healthcare Development Agency in collaboration with other health partners on Monday, commenced a free integrated medical outreach programme and child health week which is expected to last till Friday 29th January 2021.
In this interview with our reporter, AMARACHI UZOUKWU, the Executive Secretary, Abia State Primary Healthcare Development Agency,Dr Chinagozi Adindu speaks on the programme which is aimed at improving routine immunizations coverage as well as treatment of minor ailments in children between the ages of 0-2 years and ensuring the health of mothers through the delivery of different health packages.
Excerpts;
Question: What is the essence of the maternal and child health care week.
Answer: The maternal and child healthcare week is a novel program of the state primary Healthcare board. It is a week that we articulate about 16 different health interventions that we give out to mothers , Manisha newborns and infants. The idea is to reduce morbidity and mortality as it affects women of child bearing age and their children because we discovered that these vulnerable group who are the low income earners are the most affected as it has to do with some diseases and infections. We intend to try as much as possible to help them.
We give out these interventions free of charge to help them reduce the rate of sickness and death.
In Abia State, we do this programme at least twice in a year.
We use fixed post, temporary fixed post and hard to reach areas where we carry outreaches. We train our officers in the respective facilities and they go there with all the commodities that we access and give it out to people free of charge.
We flagged off this particular round on Friday where the wife of the governor, Mrs Nkechi Ikpeazu came in company of the Deputy Governor’s wife and other dignitaries. The programme commenced today and will last for the entire week in all our health facilities and outreach centres, our people are there giving out these interventions.
One of them is the Iron /folic acid supplementation, SP administration and anti-natal care for pregnant women, Tetanus toxide adminstration, Vitamin A supplementation, Screening for Acute Malnutrition ( MUAC), Deworming, immunization on all the routine antigens according to schedule and missed opportunities.
We equally do health education, Health promotion, birth registration, family planning commodities, we give out long lasting insecticide nets to mothers, HIV testing services, the focus is to prevent mother to child transmission of HIV/AIDS.
We encourage mothers, women of child bearing age to visit our health centers, care givers should take their wards and children should go to these health centers and access our services free of charge.
Question: What part has the state government played so far?
Answer: The state government is helping us by providing the needed resources with which we are able to buy some of these commodities and of course the payment of workers that will carry out these activities.
Question: Sir, since this programme started how much success has been recorded, in other words, what do you tend to achieve at the end of the programme?
Answer: We are getting reports from the field that a lot of people are already coming to the health centers to access the services. In some places, they are having difficulty in controlling the crowd so people are really interested in getting these services.
Question: Do you have a particular target in mind, the number of children you want to reach out to
Answer: We want to reach out to 200 thousand women of child bearing age and at least 80 percent of children under 5 years with our services.
Question: Sir, considering the crowd that will be coming out, I’d like to know what the agency is doing to ensure strict compliance to NCDC safety protocols during the exercise.
Answer: We taught the workers how to handle cases like that, we’ve given them quantities of the nose masks so they can give out to members of the public as they come. Secondly, we’ve provided places where they can wash there hands, we gave out sanitizers and then we have sorted them to make sure we don’t entertain so much people at the same time. We have provided seats and we are ensuring that they seat apart and handle their cases so that why they’ll leave for others to come in.
Answer: My advice for all the people of Abia is to make sure that they go to our primary Healthcare centres and access services. Our people are well trained, we have the equipments and we are willing to give out our best especially now that we are back from the industrial action. We have sufficient quantities of the commodities and vaccines, people should go and access these services, they are free, effective and reliable.
