By: Emmanuel Utibe
The Sigma Club, University of Ibadan on Saturday, April 15th 2023 held a health outreach for the University community. The event was held at the Student Union Building Car park and kicked off at 9 am.
The health outreach which included a Visual acuity check, Blood glucose check, HIV and Syphilis Testing, Scaling and Polishing, Mental Health talk and Counselling and Physical health evaluation and assessment was held in collaboration with a number of partners including Asido Campus Network UI, University of Ibadan Dental Students Committee on Dental Education and Health (UADS CODEH), ICARE Nigeria and student volunteers from among Medical and Nursing students of the University of Ibadan.
At the beginning of the event, Asido Campus Network held a mental health talk for all that were present emphasizing the need for students to give attention to their mental health in the midst of stressful school activities and make sure they reach out for professional help if they have any issues.
Speaking to Eluwa Lucky, The Sigma Chief, he noted that given the type of organization that Sigma is, this was just a way of them giving back to the community.
“As you all know, Sigma is a socio-philanthropic club, philanthropic in the sense that we give back to society, we ensure that the little we can is added to making lives better and seeing how health is indeed wealth we decided to come up with this program, the Sigma health outreach to have university students and also members of the university community who are not students benefit. You know, have their vitals checked, have their health accessed so you don’t leave anything to chance. You know you have a lot of cases where people just work and they slump. Sometimes in the Nigerian notion but then it’s just basic knowledge, you know that blood pressure is high, you know what to do, and it makes you live longer and live a better life. That’s why we said let’s have this, let’s bring partners, let’s bring medical practitioners together and then give this free outreach to the university community. So, we have ICARE Nigeria, Asido campus network, University of Ibadan Association of Dental Students Committee on dental education and health (UADS CODEH) and various student volunteers together with us doing this”, He said.
Chioma Obiorah, one of the student volunteers also had this to say when quizzed on what was been done by them today: “So basically, what is going on here is that Sigma is holding an outreach in partnership with several organizations including some student volunteers. So, we already had a mental health assessment session as well as counselling. There is also an HIV checkup clinic and counselling unit. Particularly there were the vital signs, which is what the student volunteers did, they took vital signs, that’s basically blood pressure, blood glucose level, BMI that’s your height and weight and then there was also visual acuity where you do eye checkup. There was also counselling unit by the doctor, so after you check your vitals and get the value, you come and meet the doctors and they access it and if you have any complaints, you relay it to the doctor and everything was done for free and they also handed out free condoms.”
At the time of reporting, going through the log book it was seen that by the afternoon, close to 300 students had been attended to during the course of the outreach.
