Indian High Commission’s Hanover Health Fair a success

Western Bureau:

With more than 100 adults and children showing up at the Sandy Bay Primary School, in Hanover, for last weekend’s health fair, which was staged by the Indian High Commission in collaboration with the Hanover Municipal Corporation (HMC) and the Hanover Health Department (HHD), the initiative has been declared a success.

Rungsung Masakui, the Indian high commissioner to Jamaica; Lucea Mayor Sheridan Samuels; Deputy Mayor Andria Dehaney-Grant; and Dr Kaushal Singh, the medical officer of health for Hanover, were all present at the location and were seen mixing and mingling with both volunteering health professionals and the adults and children who were present.

“It is a success. You can see the number of people who have turned out, even though it is on the weekend. As the day wears on, we expect the numbers to increase even more,” Singh told The Gleaner, shortly after the event started. “We are expecting about 150 to 180 customers before the end of the day.”

Continued Singh: “We are providing services like nutrition counselling, non-communicable diseases screening, back-to-chool medicals, also dental, heart, HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) and STI (sexually transmitted infections) screening.

“There is a pharmacy set up where we will be dispensing medication where necessary.

“Next month our focus (at the HHD) will be on the Green Island area of Hanover, so we are going to do at least three health outreach clinics) in that area for the month,” added Singh, noting that it will solely be a HHD initiative.

Masakui, who along with the mayor and his deputy, got his vitals checked during the health fair, told The Gleaner that the Hanover Health Fair was among 27 such events organised by his office in the last two and a half years.

“Our national day is on the 26th of January, and in 2021 we could not celebrate our national day because of COVID restrictions ... we thought that we could not let our national day go uncelebrated, so we came up with the novel idea to have a medical camp, because that was the need of the hour,” the high commissioner said.

According to Masakui, once the idea was sent out to the medical community for volunteers for a medical camp, within five days 14 doctors had registered to volunteer.

“So, we reached out to the pharmaceutical community and five or six companies based in Jamaica gave us the necessary medicines,” the high commissioner continued. “Since then, we have never looked back, almost every month we have a medical camp.”

Added Masakui: “We are reaching out to the unreached, and touching the untouched, that’s the motto that we keep within ourselves. We are organising another really big one on the 13th of August in Kingston.”