By EricJames Ochigbo

Some stakeholders have called for the establishment of a primary healthcare facility in Kobi Community, a suburb of Abuja, to attend to the health needs of the community.

They made the call in an interview with newsmen on the sidelines of a free medial outreach, organised by National Institute of Legislative and Democratic Studies (NILDS) Democracy Radio in partnership with Garki Hospital.

The General Manager of NILDS Democracy Radio, Mrs Uju Nwachukwu, said that beyond the airwaves, there was need to reach out to the people through other services more directly.

She said from their findings, the people of Kobi Community lacked access to medicare and the best way to touch them was to attend to their health needs.

“From our findings, we know that the people in this community have difficulty in certain health areas, especially the children and the aged.

“It was for this reason that we put this together, to be able to have some sort of intervention in partnership with Garki Hospital to meet them at the point of their needs health wise.

“The needs are enormous and because we know that government cannot do everything and individuals cannot do everything, we just like to encourage more partnership and collaborations.

“You know, it is very gracious of Garki Hospital to willingly send 10 medical personnel to us this morning; this need is enormous, we are almost overwhelmed, but with a partnership like this, we can save lives.

“So we are asking the Ministry of Health and the government in general to look more into the healthcare in rural areas,” she said.

Also speaking, Dr Sylvester Enudi, a family physician in Garki Hospital said that just by a glance at the environment, the community is prone to malaria, diarrhoea and other hygiene problems.

He said that some of the children were already showing symptoms of malnutrition.

Enudi said that the idea of primary healthcare was to bring healthcare closer to communities at grassroots.

The doctor explained that it was not just building the structure but equipping it adequately with the right personnel to manage it.

“Now you have many of them walking about with very high blood pressure and this is the case of when you hear that he slumped and died.

“Many of them are hypertensive, going about not knowing, some of them that were seen are having high blood pressure in the region of over 181/20.

“They can just slump or have heart attack and die of stroke all of a sudden, because there’s no primary healthcare where they can even go and do blood pressure check, access medication, even at that basic level it’s not there.

“So the effect of not having a primary health care is grave,” he said.

The traditional ruler in the community, Chief Audu Kaura, expressed gratitude of the community to the organisers of the outreach.

He said that the closest primary healthcare facility to the area lacked basic facility urging government to establish one in the community.

“On behalf of my people, I thank you so much, because this health has been a challenge in this community, because we don’t have good hospitals here.

“I must say I am very overwhelmed because, you know, health is wealth; without health you cannot do anything in his life. So I feel so happy that this organisation brought this outreach here.

“As you can see, we only have one primary healthcare, a place where about 5,000 people are living, how do we cope with only one primary health care?

“So we say thank you to NILDS Democracy Radio, because it is not easy for someone to bring healthcare to the community for free with medications like this,” he said. (NAN) (www.nannews.ng)

Edited by Francis Onyeukwu