The new governor of Rotary International District 9125, Rtn. Goddy Nnadi, yesterday, unveiled his goals for the 2022/2023 Rotary Year.
Nnadi who spoke at a press conference in Abuja, said promotion of healthcare, blood donation, mental health, water, sanitation and peace building would be top on his priority projects as Governor of the District in the next one year.
He said the Rotary District 9125 would be collaborating with the National Blood Service Commission in promoting the culture of blood donation in order to save accident victims and patients in dire need of blood transfusion.
He added that the District under his administration would also promote awareness on and treatment of mental health issues which is fast becoming a major issue for society and families.
He said the District is finalising arrangements to build a 24-hour service hospital in Abuja to be manned by rotarians in the medical field within the city.
According to him water and sanitation geared towards curbing open defecation in schools would be another top priority for his administration.
He said the District would also promote and encourage peace Building efforts by collaborating with relevant authorities through its Institute of Peace Building.
Rotary District 9125 is composed of 143 clubs, spread across 23 states including the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), which makes it the largest Rotary District in the country.
Nnadi who has just taken over as the Governor of Rotary International District 9125, said: “For us our star projects are about four. One is that we intend to work with the National Blood Bank to expand the blood bank system in Nigeria.
“This is to ensure that the hospitals have blood available to them for accident victims. We have contact with the Director General of the National Blood Bank, we have had a series of meetings and we developed a Memorandum of Understanding through which Rotary District 9125 will work with them, first of all, to make our members donate blood and then create awareness for more people to donate blood.
“So the blood will be certified okay, stored and made available for hospitals for helping those in need so that we don’t have recurring cases of hospitals not having blood.
“Secondly, the issue of mental health is becoming a serious issue. There are do many causes for that even though I am not a medical doctor – those who take drugs, those who are depressed, dementia – and it is becoming so much that sometimes we don’t understand it.
“If it is not treated early the people will now become fully mental and it becomes an issue for society and for families.
“We are going to create awareness about that and we are going to collaborate with so many foreign institutions.
“We already have two American institutions and one from Switzerland. In fact, the first team will be arriving here in September for us to work with them to see how we can, one, conduct seminars and workshops and then see how treatment can be done through the hospitals and healthcare centers.
“For number three, we are thinking about developing a 24-hour service hospital within Abuja.
“The framework is being worked out and we are going to have the FCT involved in that. The hospital is going to run 24 hours in the sense that we are going to have our members who are involved in the medical field.
“When I was in NIPSS, our study was on universal healthcare delivery and we touched so many states, hospitals and healthcare centres. Some of them didn’t have doctors and nurses.
“Many of them didn’t even have auxiliary nurses to take care of patients. In some of them, people were sitting on the floor and we thought that wasn’t right.
“Sometimes, we build healthcare centres and hand them over to local authorities and they are not well managed.
“So we said fine, why don’t we build one as a test case with the support of the state or FCT, get it done and ensure 24 hour power supply – we are going to have inverters, solar and the normal public power supply.
“Two, we are collaborating with our partners outside of Nigeria to build and equip those hospitals and then we use our members in the medical field to help service those hospitals on a shift basis.”
On the plan of his administration to curb open defecation, Nnadi said: “The next one is water and sanitation which leads me to the issue of open defecation.
“We have found out that in some of the schools that there is a real issue. The real issue is, you build schools and you build just one toilet to be used by both students and teachers – male and female – and that makes it susceptible for teachers to abuse some of these students.
“We think that is wrong. We have done an experiment and we have built one or two here and there and we separated the toilets. We built for teachers separately, built for students separately, built for male and female separately and you find out that the issue of abuse in that place has stopped.
“We intend to encourage all our clubs to make sure that these are done so that females are not abused and that they also have self esteem.”
He said his administration would promote and encourage peace building efforts by collaborating with relevant authorities in the country.
He added: “We also intend to engage in the promotion of peace building. We have crises all over the place. We have an Institute of Peace Building and we have a committee nationwide working in collaboration with all the other Districts to make sure that we promote peace building through awareness creation, engagements with people in government and to make sure that everything is done.”
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