Healthcare
Community Health: Protect Us All
High quality healthcare and assess is important for promoting and maintaining health, preventing and managing disease, reducing unnecessary disability and premature death, and achieving health equity for all. Without access to healthcare, people are far more at risk. Diseases, malnutrition, pregnancy – all can become incredibly dangerous without proper help and support. As such, healthcare is very vital and important in sustainability and development of local communities.
Challenges
Local community members, especially women and children, suffer from ill health, disease, malnutrition, and cannot afford healthcare or transport to healthcare facilities. Also, the lack of knowledge about health issues and superstition beliefs perpetuates unhealthy choices that cost lives and suffering in local communities in Edo state, Nigeria. These healthcare challengers are aggravated by the irregular or scarce government aid, and the precarious infrastructure located in these less privileged local communities.
- This is Why We Fight -
Taking Action
Through quarterly medical outreaches, we provide preventive medicine and palliative distribution to these less privileged local community members. We enrolled local community members in an annual health care control plan that facilitates the medical and nutritional follow-ups.
Our doctors teach the local community members about preventive health care that promotes better habits within the community and they also provide medical treatment and mosquito insecticide-treated net for the prevention of malaria. In several cases, community members will receive these medical, dentist, pharmaceutical, and optical services and vaccination for the first time ever.
Long-term Impact
We are helping several local communities with medical and nutritional needs. Our medical outreaches and palliative distribution have directly resulted in decrease nutritional deficiencies, dental problems such as cavities, malaria illness and lots more.
Also, it has resulted in increase in vaccination, lab testing and medical referrals. These preventive medicine outreaches combined with palliative distribution produced results that can be measured not only statistically, but also with prospects of a brighter future for local community members.
Mosquito Net Distribution
Malaria is the number one killer of children in the world and it poses a big threat to the people in sub-Saharan Africa, especially in Nigeria.
As such, in order to fight this disease and to drive down its prevalence, we quarterly distribute long-lasting insecticide-treated mosquito net to the most vulnerable members of the community.
We not only distribute the nets, but we also ensure that we educate the local beneficiaries on the need to sleep under them whether it is the cold or hot season.
While there is still a lot of work to be done, we’re holding out hope.
We know how to eliminate malaria.
Now it’s time to do it.