National Commission for Refugees Migrants and Internally Displaced Persons, (NCFRMI), in partnership with Association of Resident Doctors, Federal Medical Center,Keffi, have organised a medical and surgical outreach to the interfaith Internally Displaced Persons, (IDPs), camp at Gurku community in Marana, Nasarawa state.
Federal Commissioner of the agency, Aliyu Ahmed, said that the outreach is part of the NCFRMI health project tagged ‘Health Without Borders’ to cater for the health and wellbeing of IDPs and refugees across Nigeria.
“As the leading agency of the Federal Government of Nigeria responsible for the assistance and protection of persons of concern within the humanitarian space, the Commission has recorded significant impact in the area of health.
“The Health without Boarders project, is a flagship programme of the Commission to ensure access to quality healthcare for all persons of concern.
“Equally, the project is geared towards mitigating malnutrition, establishing and upgrading health facilities as well as facilitating access to free health services through health insurance. In the same vein, the Commission is proactive in the provision of psycho-social support towards restoring the physical, mental and emotional well-being of all IDPs and refugees,” he said.
Team Lead and President, Association of Resident Doctors, Federal Medical Center,Keffi, Nasarawa state, Dr. Abdulsalam Uthman, explained that the association noticed the health gap in the Gurku IDP that is why it has partnered with the NCFRMI to offer succour in the area of health to the displaced and refugees.
He said “We are here to render health care services in terms of free medical and surgical outreach to the people of this interfaith IDPs camp and we are doing this in collaboration with the federal commission migrants, refugees and internally displaced persons.
“During this programme, we are going to be seeing people with different ailments in children, youth and the elderly having one form.of medical condition or the other.
“This outreach also involves surgeries because we are going to be doing some surgical services for common conditions that requires medical intervention and those whose care goes beyond the scope of this outreach, we will give them appropriate referral and we are going to do follow upon them.”
Uthman said that al least 1, 000 persons are expected to benefit from the outreach.
Special Assistant to the commissioner on Health and Stakeholder Engagement, Dr. Fatima Abdullahi, said the commission intends to replicate similar outreaches to other IDP camps as part of its Health without Boarders project.
Speaking on the importance of the outreach to the IDPs community, Chairman of the Camp, Monday Joshua, said “We are very happy because of of this programme, we have never witnessed this before most especially about our health and we believe that most of our people will benefit from this.
“We have been here since 2014 and we have 354 families in this camp, the individual population is 2, 084 people and some of our people stay outside the camp due to insufficient accomodation.”
