Over 2,000 patients to benefit from Afikpo medical doctors' free medical outreach

By Victor Nwegede, Abakaliki

The Conference of Afikpo Medical and Dental Doctors (CAMD), Wednesday kicked off its 4-day medical outreach in Afikpo and disclosed its target to treat at least 2,000 patients for free during the programme. 

The free medical outreach held at the Mater Misericordiae Hospital, Afikpo Local Government Area of Ebonyi State was packaged by CAMD to provide health education, screening, consultation, and surgeries among other medical interventions. 

The CAMD Chairman, Dr Uduma Victor Uduma, who stated this in an interview with journalists, said, the body would provide a free eye surgical intervention, distribute over 500 reading glasses, and conduct some general surgeries including gynaecological surgeries during the health outreach.

His words: "We bring this intervention to the Afikpo community, and looking at the crowd here, you can see that we have a lot of diseases that submerge this community. But with intervention like this, people will easily come for health treatment assistance.  The most important objective of this health outreach is, to provide medical consultation, to at least more than 2,000 persons. We want to provide free eye surgical intervention including cataract surgery. 

"We want to see whether we can distribute more than 500 reading glasses which are already available with us here.  And also do some general surgeries like the removal of lumps, and hernia fluid and other surgeries including gynaecological surgeries."

Uduma further explained that the outreach was carried out by the CAMD members to impact their community positively, noting that in the course of preparation for the event, some persons and groups encouraged the organisation, financially, morally and even spiritually.  

"We have been running outreaches, but this is the first edition of the large-scale outreach, which was solely organised by the Conference of Afikpo Medical and Dental Doctors, and largely sponsored by the members with the sponsorship of other partners and illustrious sons of Afikpo, like Afikpo USA organisation. We have carried out a similar free medical outreach to Amasiri, Akpoha, Ozizza and other parts of Afikpo. Sometime, this year, we do glaucoma training, in collaboration with Dr Ginger Eke, and also do other forms of health interventions," he added.

Uduma who is also the Medical Director of the health outreach admitted that the body has the manpower medically but it needs more financial resources to facilitate this programme; however, urged other non-governmental organisations, and individuals to assist in terms of funding to provide medication, consumables for surgeries to the needy.

"We like people or organisations to take responsibility like providing accommodation, and we expect 60 or more persons to assist in expanding this programme to cater for the needs of this crowd because it is indeed a capital-intensive programme," he said. 

Also speaking, Dr Donald Egwu, the Publicity Chairman of the Sub-committee for the free medical outreach, explained that the programmes were part of the CAMD's corporate responsibility as a humanitarian group, saying it would be of great benefit to the community people, especially the indigents.