THE Enugu State Government has said it has targeted 200,000 pregnant women and 900,000 children for the 2017 immunization exercise and free medical care in Enugu State.
Disclosing this to TRIBUNE ONLINE at the weekend, the State Commissioner for Health, Dr Samuel Ngwu noted that the flagging of the Enugu State Child’s Health Week was part of the measures to address the issue of maternal death rate in the state, stressing that it had been reduced in the state following the state government’s commitment in providing free medical care to pregnant women and children.
Dr Ngwu said that Governor Ugwuanyi had given directive for the provision of all the interventions that will be used for the maternal newborn and child health week.
“So many interventions which are life saving interventions have been done and they were made possible because of the interest Enugu State Government has shown in health care delivery.
“Governor Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi gave us an open cheque and said we should purchase all the necessary interventions for the women and children in Enugu State. These interventions include Vitamin A, de worming Tablets, phasolate, Folic acid among others these are the key intervention”
On family planning, the State Commissioner said, “We are also providing all the family planning and child spacing commodity in all the health facilities in the state. This is the first time we are having full complement of interventions and I therefore urge the good people of Enugu State to ensure that every eligible child that is less than five years benefits from the governor’s magnanimity”
According to him, “Every woman pregnant or not, once you are less than 49 years, you are entitled to benefit, they are some that are meant for women at child bearing age and we are expecting that every woman of that age in the State will benefit from this activity. Not only for themselves but for even the unborn child because by the time they will go into child bearing the will be protected and their child will be protected”
He stated that a lot of people will be sent out to go and monitor what is going on, pointing out that the they have constituted a team to go to all the local governments to monitor what is happening in all the communities
“Every local government has at least one monitor who goes in there every day to monitor and observe what is going on there. The activity will be more of supportive supervision what they do is not to find fault per say but to address any challenge in the field immediately until the end of this programme so if they is need for us to extend the programs we do it provided the target audience are captured”
What is your target?
“We have different targets, children 0 to 5 we are targeting about 900,000 children and for pregnant women we are targeting about 200,000 that should be pregnant. It is based on 2016 population census it is expected that the number of pregnant in our environment is 5 percent of the population so 5 percent of our current projected population will give about 200,000 persons.
“I want to appreciate the government and women in the state. We have recorded a lot of successes in health care in the state. The last survey shows that Enugu State women has the highest number of antenatal attendance in Nigeria recording close to 96 percent which means every pregnant woman go for antenatal in the state”, he added.
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