The National Chairman of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Professor Nentawe Yilwatda, has flagged off a 14-day medical outreach to take place simultaneously in four hospitals in the Plateau North Senatorial District of Plateau State, with 25 foreign doctors participating.
Speaking during the flag-off of the outreach at the Jos University Teaching Hospital, the APC National Chairman mentioned that the exercise will also take place at Christian Hospital Vom and Sunnah Hospital, Angwan Rogo, allowing people from various parts of the senatorial district and beyond to have access to medical treatment.
He highlighted that the medical outreach was intended to complement and support President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s healthcare reform efforts, particularly through strategic interventions that extend medical services to the vulnerable and disadvantaged.
His words: ‘I’d like to thank everyone involved in this programme for their enormous contributions and enthusiasm to collaborate with us, particularly the donors from the U.S. and other countries. We have already conducted pre-medical outreach in the Southern and Central districts of the state. So, we have reached the point in the outreach when we need experts in specific medical areas.
‘We have medical teams from America and Canada; they came with the requisite medical equipment to handle all the referral cases recorded at previous missions in the Central and Southern zones, including heart surgeries and hip replacements, with the new cases to be recorded in the Northern zone.’
The APC National Chairman further disclosed that the doctors would also be involved in training Nigerian medical personnel and imparting the necessary skills.
He said, ‘So, we are optimistic that within these two weeks of their presence here, they will train Nigerian medical personnel and provide manpower training so that they can improve the capacity of Nigerian medical doctors to perform surgeries that would have been difficult for them before.
‘They will support nurses, private clinics, and private hospitals to ensure they provide more than just doing surgery and going back to America. So, it’s a very outstanding programme that will have an influence on people’s daily lives.
‘At the party level, the APC would undertake similar missions across the six geopolitical zones of Nigeria as part of its Corporate Social Investment programmes. A timetable for this will be announced soon.’
The team lead, Dr Emeka Anyanwu, who expressed optimism that the team would try to cover all cases within the period of the programme, added that the medical specialists include trauma surgeons, gynaecologists, ophthalmologists, and orthopaedic and general surgeons.