Shane Su­perville

Se­nior Re­porter

shane.su­perville@guardian.co.tt

The Prime Min­is­ter is en­cour­ag­ing the pub­lic to take the ini­tia­tive and make use of dif­fer­ent health fairs to have them­selves screened for non-com­mu­ni­ca­ble dis­eases (NCDs) to pre­vent ma­jor health is­sues lat­er on in life.

Row­ley made the re­marks while vis­it­ing the sec­ond an­nu­al Diego Mar­tin West Grand Health Fair at the Care­nage Boys’ Gov­ern­ment Pri­ma­ry School on Sun­day af­ter­noon.

The health fair was in­tend­ed to raise aware­ness of healthy lifestyle choic­es while of­fer­ing free check-ups and ex­am­i­na­tions to res­i­dents.

Row­ley vis­it­ed the health fair just be­fore 1 pm and vis­it­ed dif­fer­ent class­rooms that were used as check-up sta­tions.

Speak­ing with re­porters dur­ing the vis­it, he praised doc­tors for vol­un­teer­ing their time and ex­per­tise and stressed the im­por­tance of ad­e­quate med­ical checks to pre­vent small, man­age­able lifestyle is­sues from wors­en­ing to se­ri­ous health prob­lems.

“Some peo­ple may come here to­day with a com­plaint and the doc­tor will di­ag­nose and tell them what they did or ad­vise them of fur­ther con­di­tions.

“They may not even know they have a com­plaint and when they come here they dis­cov­er they have some­thing that re­quires their at­ten­tion.

“A sim­ple thing like hy­per­ten­sion, they are eat­ing as nor­mal, they are be­hav­ing as nor­mal, they are feel­ing good but the pres­sure is high, they are feed­ing on salt when, in fact, they could have done some­thing dif­fer­ent.

“That’s why we try to do these things. The com­mu­ni­ty ap­pre­ci­ates it.”

At one of the check-up sta­tions, Row­ley was seen test­ing his eye­sight.

Speak­ing with Guardian Me­dia of­fice man­ag­er for the Diego Mar­tin West con­stituen­cy, Yokym­ma Bethelmy said the health fair was or­gan­ised in col­lab­o­ra­tion with the Sev­enth Day Ad­ven­tist Church and was in line with goal num­ber three of the Unit­ed Na­tions’ sus­tain­able de­vel­op­ment goals which sought to raise the qual­i­ty of health and well-be­ing for all.

She said the con­stituen­cy of Diego Mar­tin West has rolled out var­i­ous health ini­tia­tives aimed at en­sur­ing a bet­ter qual­i­ty of life to all.

“We are ex­cit­ed, this is some­thing we have tried to main­tain on a con­stituen­cy lev­el and this is just a grand at­tempt at it with even more sup­port.

“Some of the things we have done in the past to pro­mote good health are the vac­ci­na­tion dri­vers where we had oth­er health screen­ings and tests done.”

Al­so at­tend­ing the fair was CEO of the Com­mu­ni­ty Hos­pi­tal of Sev­enth Day Ad­ven­tists in Co­corite, Dr Stephen Car­ryl, who said he ob­served a more health con­scious pub­lic in the wake of the COVID19 pan­dem­ic, not­ing last year’s health fair was well-at­tend­ed and an­tic­i­pat­ed a sim­i­lar turnout.

He al­so im­plored the pub­lic to pri­ori­tise their health and well-be­ing as it could af­fect every as­pect of their lives.

“Your as­set or your wealth is your health and it af­fects your abil­i­ty to work and do every­thing, so we will give you very prac­ti­cal tips as to how to do dis­ease pre­ven­tion and pre­serve health.”

The dif­fer­ent fea­tures at the fair in­clud­ed eye test­ing, prostate ex­ams, den­tal ex­ams, pap smears and blood pres­sure test­ing.