A telehealth service provider, Pre Diagnosis International, has submitted that most of the deaths being recorded in the country lately might have been due to the negative effects of growing self-medication among citizens as a fallout of inability to access proper clinical care due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
This was a major highlight of a position paper issued by the organisation recently on how public healthcare administrators can curtail the impact of COVID-19 on health delivery nationwide.
The paper noted that more Nigerians, especially those in the lower socio-economic strata, have been finding it hard to access quality and efficient healthcare due to financial constraint and ignorance. Consequently, more cases of self-medication leading to growing abuse of anti-malarial drugs, analgesics and anti-biotics have continued to trigger underlying health conditions, thereby causing avoidable fatalities.
“For a country that has for long been reeling under the various negative impacts of an underfunded health sector, Nigeria’s public health delivery system has been seriously dislocated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Health sector regulatory authorities cannot afford to watch the tide of frightening mortality and morbidity in the sector continue, especially among the poor and vulnerable citizens”, the paper stated.
PDI said as its contribution to energizing a national drive to revamp public health delivery, it has introduced a grassroots-targeted telehealth App as a modest initiative that could prove landmark in the nation’s quest to maximize the scarce health resources at her disposal in the delivery of health services to the populace.
The App initiative, the company observed, would help to reduce self-medication and its dangers as the focus is mainly to help poor and vulnerable Nigerians in, especially, rural and semi urban hard-to-reach parts of the country to access quality clinical services from their phones.
“Ours is a semi-philanthropic, charity-driven, hybrid telehealth brand with a mission to create technology-based solutions that would help Nigeria perfect different layers of health services delivery model that can transmit effective and efficient medical services to the most vulnerable in the society, to achieve the best health outcomes, such that location and socio-economic status will not be a barrier to accessing quality healthcare services in any part of the country. We are pursuing this objective under our organisation’s charity-styled Reach, Rescue and Fortify mantra aimed at delivering healthcare to two million vulnerable Nigerians annually.
“The PDI App is an interactive mobile application that gives users immediate access to highly trained and experienced full time PDI doctors who can assist them access quality healthcare from home, office, on a business trip or vacation. With just a meagre annual subscription, the user can also obtain and store latest blood pressure reading, heart health vitals, blood sugar information, as well as other vital statistics required to comprehensively evaluate the state of their health status.
And all these and other benefits are accessible at the payment of just the annual subscription and no other payment”, it explained.