Eko Health Mission storms Epe

• discovers high incidence of hypertension, diabetes

A crowd of Epe residents waiting for free medical attention being offered at the Eko Health Mission Programme

Residents of Epe local government of Lagos State have been charged to adopt a good personal hygiene and live in good and clean environment to avoid the prevalent diseases in the region.

This follows the recent discovery, during the ongoing free health mission popularly known as Eko Health Mission Programme, that the incidence of hypertension and diabetes were very high in the region.  The free health programme was conducted in the local government last week.

Dr Fumi Sokumbi, director, medical and training programmes Lagos State Ministry of Health, while advising the residents said maintaining a good life style would protect them against all manner of preventable diseases found among them.

Emphasizing on the importance of the ongoing free health mission, Dr. Sokumbi, said Eko Health Mission is taking health to the grassroots of good people of Lagos State. “The 2017 Eko health Mission is different and unique. It is unique because this is the first time we have such a mission that we have to go to all the Local Government Areas at a stretch.

“Every week we have to go to one local government area and this is the 15^thedition of the 2017 Eko health mission. We have five LGAs and LCDAs to still visit which we are going to do.”

She posited that the overarching goal now is ensuring that residents are passionate about their health.

“We want the people to also be passionate about their health; the governor of Lagos state is very passionate about the people of Lagos. He wants everybody to live in good health. “

“As we are doing that, we are educating the people to take good care of their health and whenever they have problem they should go to the Primary Healthcare Centers and the General Hospital.

“We also want the people to listen to the advice of the health personnel especially when they have surgeries to be done. I noticed that people run away from surgery and surgery is not a death sentence. It is just taking care and preventing complications from certain ailments,” she said.

From Right: Eko Health Mision Team, Dr. Tolu Aomale,Dr Fumi Sokumbi, Sole Administrator, Eredo LCDA, Muyiwa Okesanya Muyiwa Okesanya and Dr.  Dolapo Fasawe and two other officials at the programme in Epe

Speaking to journalists, Dr Dolapo Fasawe, director of Eko free health mission and also a director in Lagos State ministry of health noted that the people of Epe in terms of nutrition are well nourished.

“We have not been seeing malnutrition which is something common to other local government areas, but unfortunately, there’s a very high incidence of blood pressure and also diabetes,” she said while commending the turnout.

“The turnout in this local government has been good, we had over 2000 patients yesterday and as you can see today the crowd is much more than yesterday and we  are very excited about it because the objective is to reach as many as possible with our message and our free health care.

“What we do here is primary healthcare however, we see more complicated issues like hernia, prostate cancer, hypertrophy and we send them to the general hospitals. Unfortunately a lot of these people are not able to bear the cost of the treatment but they are aware of their conditions.

“We even see people with cancer but what this programme does is to educate them more and do a clean referral to the general hospital, meaning right from here we transport them to the general hospitals and the government usually tries as much as possible to subsidize the bill.

“However, the Lagos State insurance scheme is coming up and when people subscribe to this scheme, diseases like these will be treated for next to nothing as long as you are paying your premium,” Dr. Fasawe illuminates.

Assessing the programme, the sole administrator of Eredo LCDA, Muyiwa Okesanya said: “The programme is a wonderful initiative because it was part of the campaign promises of His Excellency Gov. Akinwumi Ambode to close the health gap between the city and rural community; that was the intention of having this programme across the communities.

“From the general treatment, we witnessed 1, 466 people yesterday, the beautiful story is that we conducted 197 tests for HIV/AIDS and they were all negative. Yesterday also we tested 490 patients for eye glasses and they were all given glasses yesterday and in all, we have total patients of 2,255 people attended to yesterday,” he noted.

He advised his people to seize the opportunity by calling more of their people to come and benefit from the scheme. To the governor, “I want to say thank you to him, he made open promise to people and he is delivering on all those promises while campaigning and he should try and do more and God will bless him,” he commented.