Dayo Ojerinde
The Ogun State Epidemiologist, Dr. Akeem Yusuf, has said the country is not putting to use lessons learnt from previous disease outbreaks.
Yusuf said this on the sidelines of the Total Care Conference organised by the Department of Nursing, Babcock University Teaching Hospital, Ilishan-Remo, Ogun State.
The theme of the conference was, ‘Epidemic Outbreaks in Nigeria: Lessons from Ebola, Lassa fever and COVID-19.’
“We’ve not put in place what we learnt during previous outbreaks. Even if we say we’ve learnt, have we applied it? We went through an Ebola outbreak in 2014, which should have taught us a lot of lessons, but in a very short time, we allowed all the lessons to disappear. We also have Lassa fever, which breaks out virtually every year in the country. We keep learning from that but have we still imbibed the lessons we learnt from those outbreaks?
“Now we are battling COVID-19, if the lessons we’ve learnt in previous outbreaks had been applied the way they should be, the pandemic should not catch us unawares. The only thing we could just be mentioning is the transmission-specific precautions. Moving forward from here, we should know that these outbreaks have come to stay; they keep changing face and causative agents. At any point in time, outbreaks will always come out and that is why we always stress preparedness,” he said.
The Director, Nursing Services of the hospital, Mrs. Ademola Oyinloye, said the conference was organised to stress the importance of quality patient care.
She said, “I came back into the country from Dubai last year. I came at the odd time of the world and that was the inception of COVID-19. After resuming here, I found out that nursing service is different from where I came from.
“Over there, patients are kings, but here it is different. It is what the health professionals tell the patients that they have to follow. I thought it within myself that if they can have it over there, we can as well have it here. That is the essence of this conference.
“We need to give total care to our patients; that is why I thought of organising it so that people will know what it entails to give total care to our patients.”
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