By Laudia Sawer
Tema, May 13, GNA – The Tema Metropolitan Health Directorate has launched the 2025 African Vaccination and Child Health Promotion Week Celebration with a call on parents and caregivers to follow health professionals’ advice for their children’s well-being.
The health week, which is on the theme: “Every Child Deserves a Healthy Future: Invest in Your Child. Attend Weighing Regularly,” would involve child health promotional activities, including vaccinations, vitamin A supplementation, birth registration, growth monitoring and promotion.
Caregivers, who participated in the programme, shared the health lessons they learnt from attending the child welfare clinics (weighing) and called on other colleagues to take the advice they received from the health officials seriously.
They shared how exclusive breastfeeding had helped in building the immune systems of their children, as well as the importance of sleeping under treated insecticide nets during pregnancy and after delivery.
Mr Daniel Idan, a father, encouraged men to help their lactating wives after delivery, as leaving the care of the children solely to the mothers would have a toll on their health and that of the children.
Mr Idan said he often accompanies his wife to send the children to the weighing centre for their vaccinations and other care and appealed to institutions to help fathers to support their wives during such times.
The launch saw health officials educating the caregivers and mothers on jaundice and nutrition, with a role play on childhood immunisations and the need to attend child welfare clinics.
Ms Gifty Essel, the nutrition officer for the Tema Health Centre, encouraged caregivers to give the children aged six months and above family food as part of their complementary feeding, stressing that such foods should not be replaced with commercially produced supplementary foods.
Ms Essel also cautioned them against feeding children fizzy drinks and sugars, as that would be detrimental to their health, suggesting that blended foods could be added to porridge to sweeten children’s food.
She also encouraged them to mix their children’s food with fish powder, plant-based protein such as beans, eggs, and meat stock to provide them with the needed nutrients while feeding them with food items from all the four-star diet groups.
GNA
LS/CA