CHAMP Orientates Community Healthcare Workers On Caregiving

In a bid to address avoidable deaths and to give a human face to Nigeria’s healthcare service, Project CHAMP has orientated 27 community and healthcare workers from across the country.

An initiative of Hearts Heartist Foundation in collaboration with Heart of Care Providers, CHAMP which represents Community, Holistic Wellness, Art, Medicine and People Empowerment, trained the beneficiaries spanning doctors, nurses, community healthcare practitioners, community engagers and artists, on how to administer holistic healthcare on patients, whom they are largely first responders, before they are treated by the doctor.

Holistic healthcare evaluates a patient’s wellbeing – mental, physical, emotional and spiritual. Thus, CHAMP participants – from Plateau, Kogi, Nasarawa, Lagos, Ekiti, Ebonyi, Osun and the FCT, were provided knowledge, network and tools, on how to incorporate the arts – such as dance/movement into mental well-being, administer preventive healthcare, and basic mental health checks to patients, in addition to promoting sustainable community healthcare practices that promote holistic wellness.

The workshop rounded off with participants embarking on group research articles on chosen healthcare issues, and a community outreach programme practicalising lessons learnt.

“CHAMP is about training and providing beneficiaries in the primary healthcare setting with tools, but also opening conversations of how to improvise healthcare in general,” said Heart of Care Providers founder, Jocelyn Lee.

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The choice to partner with the foundation, Lee said, lies in its ability to creatively incorporate the arts into health.

“Movement is incredible, but to incorporate it into health is a holistic approach that people often forget are all part of health. It (holistic healthcare) is another way of looking at a person’s health which touches not only the physical but the social, mental health, just the aspect of the whole person. We have creative speakers invited by the foundation to the workshop to touch base on what tools we can use to creatively bring healthcare into communities.

“The project is not just about coming to this training and that is the end. It is about the next step. It is about sustainability”, added Lee, which the programme is engendering through beneficiaries taking what they learn to the field, in the communities they work with via outreaches or journal articles.”

For Oluwabukunmi Olukitibi, who runs the Hearts Heartist Foundation with her twin brother, David Olukitibi, CHAMP, is about building a community of practitioners and community engagers across various disciplines in a manner that promotes and delivers alternative methods of holistic healthcare to people.

“Some of the beneficiaries are those who engage public healthcare practitioners, We want to create a space where the medical practitioner has a wider range of contact for possible collaborations where community engagement or other forms of healthcare is needed; a space where healthcare practitioners and veterans can share resources and experiences amongst themselves of what is working with those serving the underserved communities.

“We want the beneficiaries to leave this laboratory empowered with an expanded mindset and orientation, and with a new and diverse network of people, and of how to engage people within the reality and context of the Nigerian healthcare system.”