Masaka Central Hospital, a private medical facility situated in the heavily populated area of Masaka town, Karu Local Government Area of Nasarawa State on the out sketch of Abuja, the Federal Capital Territory has made advanced progress on its plans to establish an In-Vitro Fertilization (IVF) and Fertility Center to cater for disadvantaged and needy members of the public.
This plan was made known to Wind-Sound Africa when its representative accompanied a patient who took seriously ill in a public transport from Jos in May 2023 to the hospital on the direction of residents of the community who advised that it was the only place with the facility and appropriate attitude towards distressed patients within tens of kilometer distance from the high way. At the hospital our curiosity was aroused by the quantum of humanity demonstrated by the processing staff and Doctors towards other patients brought in by members of the host community and the one accompanied by our representative. The infamous “Initial Deposit” syndrome which makes or mares the lives of all emergency and non emergency patients in public and private hospitals across Nigeria was significantly ignored in the hospital while we watched un-noticed from the corner as multiple emergency patients brought in by relations were admitted and attended to without making any form of down payments by relations who pleaded unaffordability as their reasons for not doing so. It was also observed that patients who were given first class treatments and discharged were given bills that were far below what government-run hospitals were charging in deferent parts of the country and more so in Abuja outsketchs. We noticed patients whose lives were saved from life-threatening ailments being discharged without fully paying for their treatment on the striength of their mere promises to come back and pay later.
Dispensing Free Drugs
Enquiries made by Wind-Sound Africa on the underlying principles of the hospital that makes them offer the observed level of humanitarian services led to our discovery of the fact that it had every thing to do with the personal life principles of the major stakeholders of the hospital. Dr. Anthony Emmanuel Adikwu had always held a deem view of the existing disparity between the quality of medical services available to the disadvantaged and the poor on one hand and the rich, on the other hand as he went through medical school and offered professional services after graduation. He felt the rich and the poor should have affordable rights to life when they fall sick at no choice of their own. When Masaka Central Hospital was founded in 2012, the facility’s driving Mission and Vision were grounded on the delivery and sustenance of quality medical services to the the lower cadre of the Nigerian society. It is the existential foundation upon which Masaka Central Hospital was built.
The hospital was established in a social environment that needed it and since its setting up, it has been like a partnership made in heaven between it and the host community.
Dr. Anthony Adikwu Emmanuel, The man with the Vision
Masaka, is a highly populated residential area for the proletarian majority of civil servants who work at various Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) of the Federal Government in Abuja. The take home pays of these civil servants and earnings of other residents of the area traslate to death sentences for the majority of them, had Masaka Central Hospital not been founded. Significantly, only one government funded Primary Health Care Central serves the sprawling community. The daily traffic gridlocks that isolate the area from Abuja town where other Secondary and Tertiary levels of medical services can be accessed at cut-throat costs would have concerned residents of Masaka to their medical waterloo had Masaka Central Hospital not come on board. This is the bond that ties the facility and its host community together for better for worse and to the satisfaction of the existential principles of the brains behind the hospital even as it is detrimental to its normal finanancial ambitions. Further enquiries amongst members of the host community revealed that the hospital has engaged in a number of Outreach Prgrammes in the past, durring which free medical services ranging from surgeries of all kinds to post surgery care services are offered to members of the general public. According to them, numeriius life saving operations to tackle emergency cesarean section, hysterectomy, strangulated hernia, ruptured appendicitis and myomectomy have been carried out on disadvantaged members of the public at virtually no costs at the oddest hours of the night in the hospital.
Beneficiaries of Free Medical Outreach waiting patiently to be attended to.
Our findings revealed that in consonance with the well known history of the hospital’s humanitarian gesture, when it marked its first decade of existence in 2022, it signed an international partnership agreement with Helping Team International (USA) and Odumu Christian Medical Mission (OCMM) through which countless critical medical conditions were attended to and several surgeries were ferformed on all classes of individuals who could not afford the cost of such surgeries. The community dwelers and their leaders who spoke to us say they remain grateful to the hospital for their show of Corporarate Social Responsibly. Nasarawa State government has also acknowledged the extra-ordinary show of care for the health needs of its host community by the hospital. The Deputy Governor of the State, on behalf of the government, had personally conveyed the gratitude of the government in this regard during one of its four-day free medical service programmes.
Cross-section of Patients in one the many free medical outreaches
Dr Emmanuel told Wind-Sound Africa that the humanitarian principle that drives the facility’s financial policy has a lot to do with where major stakeholders of the hospital are coming from, explaining that the level of poverty that bestrides more than eighty percent of Nigerian families calls for teeth-gritting efforts by all Nigerians to give-back to the society in which ever endeavors they find themselves. He said the good will the host community of the hispital have demonstrated towards it amounts to twice the value of the amount the hospital has written off on humanitarian services in their years of relatioship.
Community leaders and other dwellers appealed to International and local Non-governmental Organizations, Humanitarian Foundations, Business Conglomerates and other Development Agencies to use the hospital to impact on the quality of lives of the host community by partnering with it for the kind of devices it has been offering them for more than a decade now.
