FCT-PHCB scales up drive to end obstetric fistula in Abuja

By Stanley Onyekwere

The FCT Primary Health Care Board (FCT-PHCB) has scaled up its determination to collaborate with relevant stakeholders, towards ending the scourge of vesicovaginal fistula, in order to help transform the lives of vulnerable women and girls in the Territory.
A Director in the FCT Primary Health Care Board (FCT-PHCB), Dr. Rukayat Wammako disclosed this on Wednesday, at the launch of the Comprehensive and Inclusive Women’s Health in Nigeria.
Wammako, who expressed concerns over the alarming number of women battling with fistula, especially at the grassroot areas of the Territory, explained that the situation is further compounded by the reluctance of the women to willingly submit themselves for treatment due to the stigma attached to the condition.
She also noted that FCT-PHCB has been collaborating with a non profit organisation, Survive Fistula Healthcare Foundation for the past three years to identify people with fistula in grassroot areas, as part of measures in order to eradicate the problem.
According to her, “The Survive Fistula Healthcare Foundation has been doing a lot in FCT, in collaboration with Hospital Management Board, Health and Human Services Secretariat, as well as FCT Primary Health Care Board; they are more closer to the Health Care Board because they’re working at the grassroot and we’re closer to the grassroot people, we work with the grassroot people.
“We are here to unveil the second phase of Survive Fistula Healthcare Foundation. We have worked with them in the past as our partners in the last three years the project now rounded up and they’re coming back for the second phase to do more in the FCT in the issue of identifying with fistula and then having fistula repairs in our hospitals.
“We identify Kwali general hospital as our referral hospital where we do repairs for fistula tissues and sometimes they even bring people from different states to FCT to have fistula surgery.
“ If you look at the far north states, sometime because of early marriage, the fistula cases are higher in that side and they queue for the surgery and sometimes because we have less in the FCT, they use to bring them here to have the surgery and the Survive Fistula Foundation takes one hundred per cent care of those people.
“We’re unveiling the second phase of Survive Fistula Healthcare Foundation, coming back the second time to work in FCT, AMAC, Gwagwalada and Kuje where they’re going to work with people with disability and then people at the grassroot.
“We also realised that there are people in the community who are having fistula and are not able to come out because of the social stigma associated with it. So this one has a long way by going deep into the community refer people and channel them to where they want to go and then be able to sustain surgery.
“We, at the Primary healthcare level after the surgery, we will try as much as we can to see that even if they are back into their home, we will rehabilitate them back into the community and absorb them into the community as well as getting back into their husband’s houses.
“This will be with serious orientation for the family. If she becomes pregnant, then she will now come back to deliver by Cesarian section because we don’t want any things to pass through the place because of the surgery and get back to the community and we allow that same person to have post natal family planning that will suit them so that the place and the organ and everything there will rest over a period of time before she go for another one again.”
On her part, the Executive Director, Survive Fistula Healthcare Foundation, Peters Ogunmiyan said prior to the intervention of the Foundation, there was no obstretic fistula repairs programme that would take care of people with the condition.
She added that the Foundation had carried out 2,000 fistula repairs on women across the six area councils and has in total, affected over 3,000 lives.
She stated that the launch of the Comprehensive and Inclusive Women’s Health in Nigeria, is a four years programme targeted at strengthening health system, train health care providers to provide quality healthcare services as well as people with disability and fistula repairs.
UNFPA leads the global Campaign to End Fistula, a drive, which represents a global commitment to fistula prevention and holistic treatment, including surgical repair and social reintegration and rehabilitation.