MSF Expands Inpatient Facility To 565 Beds To Treat Malnourished Children In Katsina

By Bukar Bolori

The international medical humanitarian organisation Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) also known as Doctors Without Borders in collaboration with the State Ministry of Health (SMoH) has expanded the capacity of its inpatient treatment facility for malnourished children to 565 beds to respond to an increasing influx of the patients in Katsina state.

The capacity is increased through opening of 80-bed Inpatient Therapeutic Feeding Centre (ITFC) including 30 bed Intensive Care Unit (ICU) at Dr. Yusha’u Armaya’u Maternal and Paediatric Health Facility in Kofar Sauri and the extension at Turai Ummaru YarAdua Maternity and Children Hospital in Katsina, the state capital.

Governor of Katsina State Aminu Bello Masari together with MSF team inaugurated the new ward in a ceremony, also attended by the commissioner of health, royal fathers, volunteers, and others on Monday.

MSF teams has been witnessing an alarming rise in admissions of malnourished children in its facilities in Katsina since the start of the year.

In June, the team had to quickly increase their inpatient capacity to 280 beds, but the influx of malnourished children was so significant both in outpatient and inpatient that restricted admission criteria had to be introduced for some outpatient treatment centres.

Between January and July, MSF teams in Katsina have admitted and treated over five thousand children suffering from severe malnutrition with complications under its inpatient programme while about 50 thousand children have so far been enrolled under the outpatient program with currently more 20,000 children in the cohort for of follow up.

“We had to put in place temporary structures by way of extension at the Turai YarAdua Hospital to effectively manage and treat the increasing number of children suffering from malnutrition, and further expand the bed capacity at Kofar Sauri”, says Hassan Issa, MSF Emergency Coordinator in Katsina, Nigeria.

“We are working in collaboration with the state government and our teams are ready to treat up to 100,000 malnourished children this year in our nutrition programme in Katsina state alone.” Katsina is one of the chronically food-insecure states in Northwest Nigeria with a low level of coverage in terms of malnutrition case management.

The state is going through escalating levels of violence and displacement have pushed many communities to their limits.

In recent years, armed groups that are locally referred to as ‘bandits’ have intensified attacks, killings, kidnappings, lootings and sexual violence. Many people cannot farm, cattle are stolen, and markets and trade are disrupted amidst soaring staple food prices – which remain above the five-year average in most Nigerian markets– in an already fragile health context. “The lean season or hunger gap is approaching its peak, and the malaria transmission is further deteriorating the health and nutritional status with more severe cases admitted that need intensive medical care (blood transfusion, perfusion, NG tube to feed children etc) in inpatients.” says Hassan Issa.

MSF teams support in the treatment of malaria through test and treat for outpatients with about 800 treated since the beginning of July. MSF also continues to support Jibia IDPs with drug donations and in July about 500 consultation was done from which 70 percent were children under five years old.

“We have reached at our maximum capacity, and the patients are still arriving in large numbers. We again strongly urge all other health and humanitarian actors to immediately take steps to address the alarming inflow of the malnourished children.”

If the current humanitarian assistance lags far behind in northwest Nigeria, that’s partly because the UN have failed to include the region in its humanitarian response plan for the country for the current year, which primarily focuses on the critical situation in the northeast. As a result, many organisations are struggling to follow up on assessments and secure funding to implement lifesaving support in northwest Nigeria, despite the known acute needs.

Other than Katsina, MSF teams has been providing treatment to malnourished children in Kano, Zamfara, Sokoto and Kebbi states. We are supporting 8 inpatient and 31 outpatient facilities across five states in the Northwest. In MSF run or supported outpatient nutrition centres, almost 53,000 patients of severe acute malnutrition (SAM) and about 25,000 patients of moderate acute malnutrition (MAM) were admitted between January and end of July 2022. Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF) is an international, independent, medical humanitarian organisation that delivers emergency aid to people affected by armed conflict, epidemics, natural disasters and exclusion from healthcare. MSF first started working in Nigeria in 1996, and currently provides healthcare services in 11 states across the country.

CONTACT: +234 810 606 6159 msf-nigeria-press@geneva.msf.org