Demerara Bakery and the Giving Hope Foundation in collaboration with the Public Health Ministry, on Saturday hosted a medical outreach offering free cancer screening for both men and women in Land of Canaan and surrounding communities on the East Bank of Demerara.
Dr Latoya Gooding and Dave Laltoo
President and founder of the Giving Hope Foundation, Dr Latoya Gooding noted that they were approached by DemBake to offer free cancer screening to residents and they readily agreed. Additionally, Dr Gooding explained that the outreach is part of their monthly exercises and made a call for more men to access the services offered.
“We have decided to come and offer free cancer screening here at DemBake for the Land of Canaan population and surrounding areas. Here today what we are offering is free breast examination, pap smear, VIA [Visual Inspection with Acetic Acid], prostate checks that include the digital rectal examination and the prostate specific antigen blood test. We’re also offering free blood pressure and sugar testing,” the doctor told Guyana Times.
The Giving Hope Foundation is a non-governmental organisation with the objective of trying to reduce the incidence of late stage cancer diagnosis in Guyana. They are going into communities to have outreaches and to educate the population in relation to cancer.
“We always work in collaboration with the Ministry of Public Heath, the Chronic Disease Department because what we are doing is aligning with what they are doing as well, so we always tag along with them or we tag them along with us. We spread the word because cancer cannot be a one organisation, it takes a nation and the more organisations we have fighting cancer, better response we will have,” she added.
Meanwhile, Administrative Manager of Demerara Bakery, Dave Laltoo said the aim of the outreach is to collaborate and give back to the community. He noted that this is the first project of its kind undertaken by the newly relaunched bakery.
“One of things we noticed is when you go to the public hospitals and so persons do not have the opportunity to have this done free of cost and what the Giving Hope Foundation does is they have a strict free policy so we wanted to collaborate and give back to Giving Hope Foundation through the community,” Laltoo noted.
There were three doctors and four nurses offering services to the residents of the area. The organisers expected to have over one hundred residents accessing the services.
