The Medical Director, National Obstetric Fistula Centre (NOFIC), Abakaliki, Ebonyi State, Professor Johnson Obuna, has noted that the centre screened over 20,000 persons for cervical, breast and prostate cancer between 2010 till date.
Prof Obuna stated this when members of the Correspondent Chapel of the Nigeria Union of Journalists (NUJ) in the state, paid him a courtesy call at the hospital.
He also noted that the hospital treated 43 patients out of 1,273 screened for prostate cancer while a total of 3,063 Vesico Vaginal Fistula(VVF) patients were treated in the hospital free of charge.
“Most of these women developed VVF because they didn’t have money to attend hospital where they will deliver. So, they keep on having the fistula. There are some of these women that after repair, they get pregnant. They go back and deliver the baby and will develop another fistula.
“Since we started these maternity services, all those women who have fistula and they got pregnant, they come here and we did caesarean section for them free. Since we started the maternity services, we have done 94 caesarean sections and then 299 deliveries. There was a 16-year-old girl that got pregnant and we did her surgery for free. That girl, if she had delivered elsewhere, would have had fistula.
“Since our hospital is already offering services for the abused, we said let us take all the abused persons and make sure that this centre is a centre you can come to if you are abused. So, we now started gender-based violence unit and we built a brand new bungalow for that. Since we started, we have handled 55 cases of gender-based violence cases cutting across rape, FGM, economic and physical abuses.
“Since we started, we screened about 21,209 cervical and breast cancer patients and 1,273 prostate cancer patients. We have also treated about 513 cervical cancer, 438 breast cancer, 43 prostate cancers, we have repaired about 3,063 fistula patients. In terms of prostate surgery, we have handled about 849. We have screened 868 cases in mammogram services and we have rehabilitated 486 fistula patients,” he said.
The medical director called for more funding of the hospital to enable it to perform more, adding that its services were free.
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