Health, it is said, is wealth. And how very true. Even though one tends to get one’s vehicle serviced regularly to stay on the road, unfortunately, we live in a society where not much deliberate emphasis is placed on health checks to stay on the road.
Perhaps due to fear, poverty and or ignorance, we have become a society that generally shies away from planned health checks unless one works in an institution where such checks become mandatory in the course of duty.
Our mantra is If it is not broken, why fix it, even though people live with health-threatening diseases. They may not know because they do not check.
It is only when one gets hit by a misfortune of ill health that “had I known” regrettably sets in, and then, the race to fix it might prove either expensive or too late.
Health and well-being
It is in this context that one would gladly welcome a programme launched last week by the First Lady, Mrs. Lordina Mahama and which seeks to focus attention on the health and well-being of all Ghanaians, especially young people, women and the vulnerable.
According to the First Lady, “every nation needs young, healthy people to drive the developmental agenda”. She said, therefore, that “it was important to ensure that people take good care of their health.”
The initiative, referred to as The First Lady’s Community Medical Outreach Programme, is in collaboration with the Ghana AIDS Commission (GAC).
The inclusion and focus on the young ones in this planned medical outreach programme is a bright idea, seeing that the future rests with them.
Though for some of us, our youthful age was more challenging, burdened with work, care for our own families, our younger siblings as well as our parents, we made time to cook healthy foods for the family and at the same time, created spare time to relax and engage in some kind of sports to stay fit.
Youth
Today, the world of the youth has turned nearly 360 degrees. In search of money like it was going out of circulation, they have no time to cook or sit as a family to eat cooked meals at home.
They seem to be in a hurry all the time and therefore, dependent on fast foods served in plastic bags from breakfast to lunch, through to dinner. Fast foods are seasoned with extra salt and preservatives and cooked in saturated fats. They top them up with canned sugar-laden energy drinks and aphrodisiacs, unmindful of the risks to their health.
The dangerous thing is that some of them do not know their health status and do not have the time to find out. When their head aches, they reach for pain killers from their medicine cupboards and go back and sit for hours behind their computers with only a few hours of sleep, another silent killer, experts tell us.
The First Lady’s initiative, if adhered to, will hopefully change a lot of things if priority is given to preventive education and direction.
Medical outreach
The Medical Outreach Programme aims to raise awareness, offer free check-ups and provide medical advice and counselling to help more people take care of their health and wellness.
With sustained energy, this could be a super programme for the targeted groups, especially the youth. In recent times, there has been a regrettable surge in the ill health of our young ones with threatening lifestyle diseases, which sometimes end in death.
Sometime ago, the obituaries one saw in the newspapers were mostly for the aged. There is now a shift. Many more youthful deaths are seen reported with “Gone too soon”, “What a shock”, “Painful exit” messages.
When one goes into the same field to find out the causes of death, it is common to hear about sudden heart attacks, strokes, embolism, and other fatalities, sometimes linked to lifestyle diseases.
Our youth are acquiring undesirable lifestyle diseases and living in pain and misery, sometimes out of ignorance. Some are dying prematurely because they never did any health checks that would have unveiled the problems in their minds and bodies, and tragically leave behind very young families and aged parents.
As the First Lady said at the opening of her outreach programme, early health tests have saved lives and continue to save lives. She advised that knowing one’s health status enables one to start early treatment, which could prevent serious complications that would help protect lives.
For now, the services available under the outreach include HIV testing, syphilis and TB screening. Others include malaria testing, blood sugar monitoring, Body Mass Index (BMI), nutrition counselling, breast examination, blood pressure, eye, ear, nose and throat (ENT)screening, among others.
Many more such outreach programmes need to be made available, decentralised and spread in communities for easy access by the targeted groups.
While on it, of next concern is child health and childhood vaccinations with the collapse of international aid. What are we going to do as a nation to protect our babies and children in terms of immunisations that would help them grow into healthy adults and future leaders?
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The writer can be contacted via email at [email protected]
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