The Federal Capital Territory Administration (FCTA) has vowed to deal with the alarming charge of new child deaths attributable to preventable ailments within the FCT.
The Mandate Secretary for Well being Providers and Setting Secretariat of the FCTA, Adedolapo Fasawe, disclosed this whereas commissioning the New child Important Options and Applied sciences (NEST) 360 care tools donated to Wuse Common Hospital, Abuja.
Fasawe highlighted the urgency of the scenario, citing the 2023/2024 Nigeria Demographic and Well being Survey, which reported over 281,000 new child deaths yearly and a neonatal mortality charge of 41 deaths per 1,000 reside births.
The statistics, based on him, place Nigeria among the many international locations with the best charges of neonatal mortality worldwide.
Fasawe affirmed that the brand new tools would considerably improve neonatal care and play a vital function in saving lives.
The superior tools donated by NEST360, beneath a challenge applied by APIN Public Well being Initiatives, contains three Phoenix Radiant Heaters, seven Oxygen Concentrators, 5 Pumani Bubble CPAP machines, three Canta Oxygen Stream Splitters, three 3A Aspead Suction Machines, six Bistos Pulse Oximeters, two BiliDX Bilirubinometers, 5 Phoenix Phototherapy items, two Haemoglobinometers, 4 Temperature Displays, three Mindray Syringe Pumps, and two MTTS Lightmeters.
The instruments are anticipated to boost the administration of new child problems and be sure that each child receives the very best care attainable from start.
Fasawe, who was represented by the appearing Director Common, FCT Hospital Administration Board, Dr. Olugbenga Bello, mentioned: “Insufficient entry to life-saving tools, insufficiently educated healthcare employees, and poorly managed problems proceed to say the lives of our youngest residents.
“The FCT Well being Providers and Setting Secretariat prioritize maternal, neonatal, and youngster healthcare.
“As such, a number of interventions have been undertaken, together with the scale-up of complete and fundamental emergency obstetric and new child care throughout all ranges of well being supply, improved quality-of-care actions, provision of free medical health insurance enrolment for all pregnant girls and weak youngsters, and the renovation of maternity and youngster emergency wards and rooms.
“Due to this fact, the NEST360 program enhances our imaginative and prescient for seamless accessibility to common and high quality care by all residents of the FCT, no matter their creed, social standing, or place of residence.
“We’re dedicated to this partnership with NEST360, an progressive world well being initiative geared toward enhancing neonatal care throughout Africa. NEST360 works to cut back neonatal mortality by equipping hospitals with inexpensive, high-quality applied sciences.”
He urged the hospital administration to make sure that the NEST360 intervention interprets to influence.
Responding to the NEST360 gesture, the Medical Director (MD) of the hospital, Dr. Oluseyi Ashaolu Opeyemi, expressed happiness that the initiative was focused at newborns.
“Principally, that is focused in direction of the entire care of the new child from start to a minimum of the newborn is about 28 days outdated.
“So, this has outfitted us to have the ability to tackle even infants which can be very sick, infants which can be fairly untimely, you recognize, to forestall problems and on the similar time deal with them.
“In the end, the tools has empowered us, in addition to inserting us at a vantage place to have the ability to attend to a critically sick affected person which is an efficient enchancment on what we used to have up to now,” Dr Opeyemi acknowledged.
The Nation Director for NEST 360, Opeyemi Odedere, mentioned the initiative was meant to collaborate with Federal and State governments to make sure that neonatal mortality is decreased within the nation.
Based on him, in collaboration with others, together with its implementing companion, APIN Public Well being Initiatives, the objective is to make sure that important applied sciences are supplied to all of the services supported by NEST360 throughout the nation.
Odedere mentioned: “These important applied sciences are applied sciences which can be serving to to deal with the important thing new child issues.
“These are all important tools which can be wanted to make sure that the excellent new child care wanted by new child infants is sufficiently supplied.”
He emphasised that the intervention goes past the donation, because it contains complete coaching for well being employees and technical specialists to function and keep the tools successfully.
“We’re not stopping at simply making this intervention, we’ll preserve a detailed eye on how the tools is performing, observe progress, and measure the milestones we hit in tackling neonatal mortality with high quality care. And we’ll do all this utilizing information to information us.”
He mentioned NEST360 has educated over 700 clinicians and biomedical engineers throughout Nigeria, implementing comparable interventions in FCT hospitals, together with Asokoro, Bwari, and Nyanya, in addition to 13 different secondary and tertiary well being services.
He mentioned NEST360 has established 5 medical and technical expertise laboratories nationwide.
