A total of 184 Health Personnel from 91 health facilities across six LGAs of Bauchi State have been trained on issues related to Maternal, Infant and Young Child Nutrition (MICYN) to promote nutrition in effective and efficient healthcare service delivery.
The disclosure was made by Sabuwa Tahir, State Technical Officer, Gender Equality Unit of SPHCDA, working on Reproductive health and Adolescent Health plus Nutrition while speaking with Journalists in Azare on the intervention of Alive and Thrive fhi360 in improving issues of nutrition in the state.
She explained that Alive and Thrive fhi360 since it came to support healthcare services in Bauchi state, has embarked on issues of training to enlarge the scope and understanding of the new concept of MICYN.
According to her, “You know that nutrition has been somehow neglected initially in Bauchi state and Nigeria as a whole. But in the advent of what is happening now, many organizations are now supporting the issue of nutrition.”
The Technical Officer added that now, there are a lot of activities that have been done and are still doing other ones on nutrition particularly that of the mother, the child, Newborn and U-5 children.
Sabuwa Tahir said, “Initially, we have been concentrating on infants’ nutrition but it has been understood that you have to include the mother in order to have a healthy child, that is the reason we are now moving into Maternal, infant and young child nutrition (MICYN). We are talking about it and we have trained a lot of people.”
“I particularly went for a master train the trainers in Abuja in May this year, when we had a national training and I came back to Bauchi and stepped down the training to State people and followed up to 6 LGAs and supervised what has been happening,” She added.
She added, “We also conducted the training in those 6 LGAs, to talk about what has been happening and to scale down the training there. We trained a total of 91 health facilities in the 6 LGAs. In each facility, we trained 2 personnel, which means that in total, we have trained 184 personnel on MICYN.”
According to her, “That is not enough, because, we also trained them on data entry, because we have a register at the facilities known as ‘Dan Marayan Register’ meaning ‘Orphan Register’ which is birth and growth monitoring register, as there is no specific person in the facility to fill it.”
“But with the advent of MICYN training which we did in Bauchi for most of our facilities, we now have a person who is responsible for filling that register,” She explained.
Sabuwa Tahir stressed, “Initially, I thought that it was only UNICEF that was talking about the first 1,000 days of the child’s life which starts from pre-pregnancy to birth and the first 2 years of the child.”
According to her, “Now, Alive and Thrive fhi360 is into it using the MICYN aspect, so initially it was not everywhere that we were having it, I mean maternal nutrition until what Alive and Thrive fhi360 has done.”
. TheWitness
