Dele Moses, Ilorin
Kwara State government has commenced training of medical personnel from both public and private health institutions for effective service on prevention, control and management of COVID-19 cases.
The training, according to the Director, Public Health of the state Ministry of Health, Oluwatosin Fakayode, is to be carried out at both the state and local government levels.
Fakayode who spoke at a state level training of the personnel on Monday said that the training would take place in all the 16 local government areas of the state.
The health officer explained that the Monday state level training involved first cluster of 25 top clinicians from tertiary and secondary health institutions.
He stated: “In line with governor’s directive, as we recall that the technical team was set up yesterday to push out strategies, thus we are today training top clinicians in our tertiary, secondary and private practitioners. This is to improve knowledge base of this set of clinicians about infection prevention and control, and more specifically, to know how to improve our strategies against the dreaded Corona virus disease.
“This is the first cluster of 25 participants in line with the directive of His Excellency. We’ll still have different clusters of top health workers that will be trained to contain the dreaded virus, prevent and keep Kwara safe.
“Here we have senior medical doctors, nurses, Red Cross, private practitioners and institutions. This is because issue of health has to be holistic. They are all trained and they’re expected to cascade the training so we can remain safe in the state.”
Also speaking, one of the participants, Baba Awoye Isa, deputy chairman, Nigerian Medical Association (NMA), Kwara state and a consultant with the University of Ilorin Teaching Hospital (UITH) described the training as essential and said that knowledge gained would be extended to other health workers so that its impact could be felt in nooks and crannies of the state.
“Kwara State government realising that health workers need to be trained organized the programme so that people that are trained here will go back to their various work places to train other people in order to step down the knowledge gained from here to other health care workers on this COVID-19 that is ravaging the nations all over the world. Participants are trained on use of personal protective devices, handwashing, infection prevention and control programme generally. These are big topics we dealt with properly and will to back to our various places of work, our community health centres to train other people,” he said.