Ikpeazu: Innovating To Serve Abians

The Ikpeazu administration has recorded incomparable milestone in health delivery in less than 3 years.
As of today, each community in Abia state is serviced by one or more of the 292 functional primary healthcare centers in the state.

For the 17 Local Government Areas, there are 17 secondary healthcare facilities including the general hospitals at Aba, Umuahia, Ohafia, Isuikwuato and Obingwa, conscientiously nurtured by the administration of Dr. Victor Okezie Ikpeazu to serve the secondary healthcare needs of the great people of our state.

Fact, Ikpeazu’s administration commissioned Obingwa and Ohafia general hospitals in 2016. Three other new general hospitals are at 95% completion level, namely; Okeikpe in Ukwa West LGA, Arochukwu and Ikwuano general hospitals. Additionally, construction of a new general hospital at Nkporo in Ohafia LGA is ongoing.

It is also on record that the Ikpeazu administration reopened Aba general hospital after nearly a decade of being moribund.

Our dear state also has 2 tertiary healthcare facilities at Aba and Umuahia. They are the Abia State University Teaching Hospital and the Abia Specialist Hospital respectively. The two serve as referral facilities for the good people of Abia State, in addition to the federal government owned Federal Medical Center (FMC) Umuahia, formerly known as Queen Elizabeth Hospital. The government is also partnering with Diaspora groups to deliver brand new Mother and Child Specialist Hospital in Umuahia as well as the first kidney transplant centre in the South East region of Nigeria.

When you read the tissue of lies and propaganda churned out by opposition hirelings on the Abia Tele-Health initiative, you will get the false impression that governor Ikpeazu is using the initiative as alternative to provision of other physical healthcare facilities in the state.

What do you really expect from folks who live in cyberspace and know next to nothing about the concrete activities going on in Abia State?

Recently, an opposition social media operative made a spurious claim on the Tele-health initiative and challenged me to take him and his fellow co-travellers to the location of the operational headquarters of the initiative in Abia. Apparently, another member of his ‘see no good’ clan told him that the facility is hosted outside Abia State and hence the Vice President, Prof Yemi Osibanjo, did not Commission it on the day he visited the state to launch the initiative.

Half education is dangerous. Especially when the individual is suffering from acute illusion of knowledge. So to help educate my brothers I accepted the challenge to take them to the center but since then they fled and continued looking for more propaganda and half truths to share.

Ike ga agwu ndi asiri na ugha.

The Vice President of Nigeria was billed to officially open the operational support center of Abia Tele-Health initiative on the 11th of April 2018 after launching the initiative at the ultra modern International Conference Center (ICC) in Umuahia. But by the time he concluded the ceremonies around the launching of the initiative he was pressed for time as he had to be in Anambra State to launch the MSME clinic. He delegated the opening of the support center to Governor Ikpeazu and moved straight from ICC to Anambra State.

Governor Okezie Ikpeazu Commissioned the center on behalf of the Vice President of Nigeria.

Given that the opposition hirelings have developed cold feet, with regards to their proposal to visit the facility and see first hand what Governor Ikpeazu has put in place, I elected to share some pictures and videos of the operational headquarters of the Abia Tele-Health initiative located inside Government House Umuahia.

Governor Ikpeazu is running a ‘come and see’ administration in Abia. If you can’t come we are ever ready to send you pictures and videos.

It is a remarkable evidence of ignorance that the opposition shenanigans actually contested the appropriateness of Government house, Umuahia to host the facility and even raised questions on whether there is a server room there or not. For public information, security and availability of steady power supply informed the choice of Government House Umuahia.

Please tell those guys that patients don’t visit Tele-health centers. Just like phone subscribers don’t freely visit call centres. Nobody is expected to be physically treated at a Tele-health centre. Rather, patients are directed to the nearest primary, secondary or tertiary health facility, where they need physical examination.

Those currently living in Abia State can access our Tele-health facility via the number 07002242432584 or 0700ABIAHEALTH. Governor Okezie Ikpeazu is offering FREE trials to all citizens prior to the roll out of the cards denominated as N500 or N1000.

As Prof Osibanjo said, “mobile phone serves as a means of delivering healthcare to the people especially the most vulnerable and downtrodden and ensures even communication with doctors through local language or dialects.

“Success or otherwise of the programme will depend largely on the willingness of the caregivers to take up issues and deal with them where and when necessary.”

Prof Osibanjo kotara sign.

Obviously Governor Ikpeazu is innovating and thinking above the level of understanding of Abia opposition hirelings and their leaders. Yet we must help them understand why Dr OkezieIkpeazu was awarded Vanguard Governor of the year 2017, to their dismay.

In the words of the multiple award winning Governor Ikpeazu:
“What you are seeing here today is an exemplification of our desire to deploy science and technology in providing healthcare solutions to the greatest number of Abians and stamp out quackery in our state.

“The doctors maintain the highest level of confidentiality of the patients and the Primary Health Centres are linked to our call centre.

“I call on Abians to treat the ‘dial-a-doc direct’ cards as a lifeline, as the initiative will help bring an end to years of high maternal and infant mortality rate.”

Abia Tele-health initiative is not designed to take over the ethical need for face to face engagement between doctors and patients or replace the need to build and sustain physical healthcare facilities. It is simply an attempt to use available ICT resources to deliver affordable healthcare and further support the Governor’s stated objective of integrating primary, secondary and tertiary healthcare in order to extend life expectancy in Abia State above national average.

Today, Governor Ikpeazu has deployed trained care givers to 8 LGAs to take care of our senior citizens who have been abandoned by many of us who live outside the state and only periodically send money to them.

Do you know that most of our parents who invested in us, as their major Social Security hedge at old age, are living in squalor with nobody available to help them with things like cleaning their environment, bathing and buying recommended drugs necessary to support them at old age?

How many of us realize that what our parents in the villages need are actually Love and Care, as against money that they can’t spend on their own? Have you asked yourself why our parents at death keep huge sums of money that we apparently sent to them, under their beds and in cans?

Many of them are too old and tired to even go to the market to use our money and buy things for themselves and indeed cannot cook again. In frustration many of them develop mental challenges and the response of others in the community is unfortunately to chain them like mad persons and wait till they die or their children return from abroad, Lagos or Abuja to take care of them.

Those our senior citizens would have enjoyed their senior years if they had invested the money used in training us in life insurance policies as done by their peers abroad. But like we are also doing today they invested in their children in the hope that they will take care of them by providing much needed love and care when they can no longer work and take care of themselves.

Those children have abandoned them to chase after their own needs and survival. The only reward the investors (old parents) might end up getting will be “befitting burials” which actually celebrates some of those who abandoned their parents to die.

The good news is that Governor Ikpeazu analyzed the situation of our senior citizens and decided to launch a FREE home care service to help them clean their environment, bathe, feed and help them get and take their recommended drugs. Many also receive food from Ikpeazu’s care givers.

Search and watch the video of Ikpeazu free home care service and you just might thank God that Dr Okezie Ikpeazu is the Governor of Abia State.

‘I will do’ is certainly inferior to ‘I have done’ and Ikpeazu is innovating to do things while you are busy criticizing what you barely understand but which is touching real lives.

Uchunization of politics.

Whatever you do or say, Ikpeazu go go again…..aka Chukwu di ya!

JOK