By Donald Iorchir
Residents of the Territory, particularly nursing and expectant mothers, have been enjoined to take their health and those of their children seriously by eating balanced diet, and giving the newborns essential vitamins and minerals to enhance their mental and physical development.
Executive Secretary, FCT Primary Health Care Board, Dr. Mohammed Rilwanu, gave the charge recently at a workshop organised to adequately prepare health workers for the Territory’s Maternal, Newborn and Child Health Week (MNCHW), scheduled to run from May 15 to 19, this year.
Rilwanu said the week-long event, which takes place twice a year, had activities such as health promotion, birth registration, nutrition, immunisation, as well as care for the sick, among others.
He said: “Social mobilisation is very important because you have to tell the people to come out to the facilities to use them so that they do not go to babalawo (native doctor) to seek solutions to health challenges, only to run to us only when it is too late. Let them come out early.
“Let us do our very best, and do not hand over your job to others who are not trained for it. And let us carry out our training very well, or else, we will have problems.”
The executive secretary urged area councils to pay up their counterpart funds “so that we will serve the people better.”
The Director, Planning, Research and Statistics who spoke on a theme, planning, human resource and logistics while urging the residents to turn out en-mass to designated centers for health solutions, charged the healthy workers, most of whom nutritionists, dieticians and others to plan everything from the minutest of activity and ensure they come out on time.
The Territory’s Coordinator of Nutrition, Mrs. Clementina Okoro, advised mothers to always ensure that they “prevent severe malnourishment in children by giving them Vitamin A, de-worming and feeding them rightly regretted that cases of severely malnourished children mostly end up in death because of the high cost and knowledge of treatment.”
Okoro, while demonstrating the right method of administering Vitamin A, explained that the one with blue capsule was for children between the ages of six and 12 months, while the one with red capsule was for those aged between 12 and 59 months.
