BY AUGUSTINE AVWODE
As a demonstration of Governor Yahaya Bello’s commitment to the provision of quality healthcare services to the people of Kogi State, the government has procured Nigeria’s first Hyperbaric Oxygen Treatment Chamber to strengthen the state’s healthcare delivery system.
The equipment is set to strengthen the critical institutions and systems required to effectively provide affordable and quality healthcare services to the people.
Commissioner for Health, Dr Saka Audu, in a statement in Lokoja on Sunday, assured that the procurement of the medical equipment would reduce incessant medical tourism abroad.
Saka noted that, “Nigeria is now the fifth country in Africa that can boast of such sophisticated medical equipment as the Kogi State Government has broken the age-long jinx.
“This is great news for Nigerian patients who hitherto had to travel abroad for such diagnosis and treatments. Whoever has been following the trend of achievements in Kogi State Health Sector must have seen the purposeful move to turn the state to a choice destination for health tourism.
“This was made possible by the determination of His Excellency Yahaya Bello to revamp the state’s health sector and change the old narrative of a moribund sector that supervised substandard services.”
Saka described the equipment as very useful in healing people with both internal and external life threatening injuries as well as health complications such as air or gas embolism, brain and sinus infections, necrotizing soft tissue infections, arterial insufficiency or low blood flow in the arteries, radiation injury especially as a result of cancer treatment, anaemia, osteomyelitis, gas gangrene, carbon monoxide poisoning, burns and skin grafts.
“With the ravaging economic reality in our nation, we need to reduce the rate at which people travel abroad to access medicare
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“HBOT is becoming increasingly popular and mostly used as adjuvant therapy to conventional treatment/management of some life threatening conditions to minimise healing times.” he added.
Also speaking to journalists in Lokoja, Commissioner for Information and Communications, Kingsley Fanwo, said the newly acquired equipment was part of the many facilities acquired by the state government for ongoing health institutions being constructed in the state.
“We are at advanced stages in our ongoing hospital projects across the state and we hope to equip them with what other hospitals don’t have in Nigeria. We want to make Kogi healthcare institutions serve the entire Nigeria.
“With the ravaging economic reality in our nation, we need to reduce the rate at which people travel abroad to access medicare. Billions are being wasted in foreign hospitals. It is the agenda of the Alh. Yahaya Bello Administration to create such environment and provide such facilities in Nigeria. The administration has performed excellently in healthcare delivery and we hope to do more as many Nigerians are now migrating to our state.
“We are ready to provide infrastructure, including health infrastructure to meet the needs of the burgeoning population of the state”.
Fanwo assured the people of Kogi that the state will soon become the “centre of healthcare excellence,” insisting that Bello is already “creating the Nigeria of his dreams in Kogi State”.
