Private Covid-19 treatment centre opens in Abuja
An 11-bed private facility for Covid-19 isolation and treatment has opened in Abuja in hopes of meeting the capital city’s need for a response to the coronavirus pandemic. EHA Clinics opened the centre after weeks of manning a mobile testing site on the venue of the clinic at Jabi’s Life Camp district. COVID-19: Nigeria records […]
An 11-bed private facility for Covid-19 isolation and treatment has opened in Abuja in hopes of meeting the capital city’s need for a response to the coronavirus pandemic.
EHA Clinics opened the centre after weeks of manning a mobile testing site on the venue of the clinic at Jabi’s Life Camp district.
The centre boasts facilities to cater to patients with “mild to moderate” Covid-19.
It is a critical need for Nigeria’s capital Abuja, which currently has the second-highest number of Covid-19 cases in the country, with until now only two centres for Covid-19 isolation and treatment.
It previously provided mobile testing to speed up results in cases where travellers needed to obtain quick results on their Covid-19 status.
The centre offers continuous monitoring of vital signs, respiratory support and administration of medication.
Crucially, it minimizes physical contact between health workers and patients. Patients and health workers take different entry points into the 11 private rooms.
Respiratory support and units for monitoring vitals are in place in each room, but a medical team can remotely monitor patients’ vitals from another room. An alarm goes off once an emergency arises.
The remote monitoring allows health workers to monitor patient vitals for breathing responses depending on time of day, laying position, medication administered—all indicators that have emerged as critical in the management of Covid-19 patients.
“One of the challenges is people have a fear of Covid-19, so when someone shows up with Covid-19, everyone backs away. So if someone is having a stroke or heart attack, they are not going to get the care that they need because Covid-19 is a new disease, how it affects people with different conditions is still being learned,” said Adam Thompson, chief executive officer of EHA.
Covid-19 affects people with underlying medical conditions in different ways, and large-scale compiling of data is needed to understand how Covid-19 interacts with existing medical conditions.
“The challenge with the data, most of it is from the US and Europe. For the population of Nigeria, we don’t actually know the underlying conditions that are most prevalent that are going to lead to complications of Covid-19,” said Thompson.
“So, one of the things we hope to do as people come through this centre, is look at the data, compile the data and make sure we share it with authorities and research institutions and hospitals so that as we learn about the risk factors that affect the Nigerian population, we can actually address that here and not just copy what’s happening in the US or China.”
The centre is privately owned and cost could range up to N100,000 a night for managing Covid-19 patients.