Lions Club to build dialysis facility at LUTH, completes other medical projects
By the end of 2018, a new world-class renal dialysis facility will be available at the Lagos University Teaching Hospital (LUTH). This is in furtherance of the new service thrust by Lions Club International (LCI) to curb diabetes as announced at its 100th International Convention in Chicago earlier in July, 2017.
The donation was revealed in Lagos by Olatunbosun Okpeseyi, the newly-elected District Governor of Lions District 404 A1.
“With regards to design and plan, what we are looking at is to see if we can complete it on or before the end of this Lion’s Year,” he disclosed during a press briefing held at the association’s secretariat.
Okpeseyi, elected District Governor on August 26, 2017 to complete the tenure of former District Governor Olushola Dada, who died on July 12, 2017, at the Murtala Mohammed Airport while returning from the club’s international convention in Chicago, USA reiterated his commitment to the projects and programmes of his predecessor, of which building a world-class renal dialysis centre at the Lagos University Teaching Hospital (LUTH) is the foremost priority.
“We are putting in our optimal effort to get it completed before the end of this Lions Year; if we can’t achieve that substantially, would have achieve more than 75 percent, and we can proceed from there in the next Lions Year, but it is a design that we are working hard to ensure that we complete it,” Okpeseyi affirmed.
The dialysis centre is estimated to cost N200m. Despite the sudden demise of the initiator, the various stakeholders––including the LUTH authority––have declared their resolve to go ahead with the project as planned.
According to the new District Governor, three committees–the technical committee, the implementation committee, and the Lions Club International Foundation liaison committee are working in harmony, and on November 19, 2017, a fundraising will take place at Harbour Point, Victoria Island, Lagos.
Okpeseyi stressed the importance of having a world-class dialysis center in the country, the absence of which he described as “one of the fastest killing problems” facing Nigeria.
“What we are trying to do is a one-stop arrangement centre where everything connected to renal dialysis is taken care of within the building. The facility we are putting on ground is going to be one of the best in Nigeria, if not in the entire West Africa region,” he asserted.
The objective of the project, he emphasized, aligns with the ethos of Lions Club as a service organization to alleviate the sufferings of the less privileged.
“One of the reasons we chose a government hospital is to make this service accessible to those who do not have so much money to travel abroad to access this kind of facility,” said Okpeseyi.
While observing that a dialysis centre is a very expensive facility, he, however, opined that “if we domesticate it on a sustainable partnership arrangement with the hospital,” it would address the issue of the accessibility for the less privilege.
It is not going to be totally free, he admitted, “but it is not going to be as expensive as you have it now.”
He briefly dwelt on the diabetes profile of Nigeria. While a Lions Club effort is still ongoing at gathering reliable statistics, he avowed that the discoveries so far are as startling as to demand an intervention awareness campaign to sensitise the public.
“A lot of people have diabetes and they are not aware. They don’t even know what it means,” he said.
Meanwhile, other Lions Club health programmes such as cornea transplant, Cataracts surgery, diabetes awareness campaign, Pediatric cancer screening, eye screening and provision of glasses are on-going.
Ifeoma Okeke