FBN Bank Ghana, a subsidiary of First Bank of Nigeria Limited has organized a medical outreach and free health screening as part of the bank’s 2019 Corporate Responsibility and Sustainability (CR&S) Week.

The medical outreach which was held at the Santa Maria and Suame branches of the bank saw patrons being takenthrough eye screening, hepatitis b screening, fasting/random blood sugar, body mass index, height, weight, blood pressure and malaria.

Speaking in Accra, Head of Commercial Banking at FBNBank Ghana Limited, Mr. William Neequaye said the bank’s CR&S Week is driven to amplify the culture of “Employee Giving and Volunteering Programme” with a focus on reinforcing the values of the bank’s SPARK (Start Performing Acts of Random Kindness) initiative.

“We, as a bank, can only thrive in a healthy society and thus we consider the health needs of our customers and the general public as an important aspect of socio-economic development and our business. This exercise is our way of helpingour customers and the general public receive medical care to enable them live healthy lifestyles” Mr. Neequaye said.

Dr. Ayango Annan, a specialist in family medicine at the Korle-Bu Poly Clinic who led the medical team for the Santa Maria exercise spoke of the need for Ghanaians to attach extreme importance to their health by attending regular check-ups.

According to her “there is the need for us to always know our health status in order to be in a better position to deal with conditions that might prove fatal if unattended to.”

On her part, Dr. Ellen Konadu Antwi-Agyei, an optometrist at Optical Express Eye Centre in Accra spoke of the immense benefits such an exercise presents to beneficiaries. “Most people in the community suffer from a wide range of diseases but they do not come out, so until you do such exercises, you are unable to fish them out” she says.

According to her “A lot of eye diseases for instance do not have symptoms and thus anyone suffering from some of these eye diseases might not feel anything until the conditions reach advanced stages which renders rectifying such conditions difficult.”

Dr. Antwi-Agyei commended FBN Bank for the exercise and appealed to the bank to consider rolling out such exercises at least twice every year for maximum impact.

The FBN Bank CR&S Week was marked in Ghana, Nigeria and in other countries where First Bank of Nigeria Limited has footprints in The Gambia, Guinea, Senegal, Serra Leone, DR Congo and the United Kingdom.

In all, over 400 lives were directly impacted at the medical outreach and health screening, culminating in thousands of lives that were indirectly impacted as dependents of the patrons.