Pistis Empowerment Foundation, the social intervention arm of the Elevation Church, has put plans in place to offer free medical and surgical outreach to reach 5,000 underserved people within its area of operation.
The lead pastor, Elevation Church, chairman of Pistis Foundation, Godman Akinlabi, who made the disclosure, said the foundation, which was set up primarily to address three focus areas, education, health and shelter, tagged the event “2022 Ubomi Medical Outreach.”
Akinlabi explained that Ubomi, a flagship initiative under the health sub-sector of Pistis Foundation, from July 4 to 8, for the 2022 edition, was conceived to bridge the gap between meeting the spiritual needs of people and other aspects of their lives, saying, “We know that the problems in our society are not only spiritual. A lot of it is economic, social and physiological.”
He added that the church realised that “we have to balance our outlook to touching lives so that it would not only be meeting their spiritual needs but also being able to meet their social and economic needs.”
In his explanation, the intervention could reach about “6,000 to 7000 people” if the need arises to allow the underprivileged to gain access to primary health care and added that the foundation leveraged “our convening power as a church to be able to gather volunteer professionals together to be able to meet those needs and settle the bills with our partners and meet those needs.”
Akinlabi added that in 2021, the foundation decided to focus on fibroid and hernia surgeries, conducting 115 surgeries in the year.
He said, “Now we are back and we are not going to limit it to only those two areas. It is going to be open to as many people as possible.
“We will look for opportunities to go to regions, but we have to be in places where people can travel and access the facilities there, saying it was looking at getting partners for transporting people into Lagos.”
Also speaking, Leonard Thomas, general manager, Pistis Foundation, said the outreach would majorly cover underserved people within the Eti-Osa local government area.
“We’ve partnered with a lot of organisations, including Prohealth International,” he said.
“They happen to be our technical partners for this outreach. We are going to be working with the Lagos State government, precisely, the Ministry of Health. They’ve also approved the use of one of the hospitals in the Eti-Osa Local Government Area, precisely the Eti-Osa Mother and Child Centre.”
He added that the foundation had started pre-registration and pre-screening to ensure that only the underprivileged benefited from the programme, adding that over 100 medical practitioners would be attending to patients’ needs at the outreach.