Patients lament high cost of medical services at UCTH

John Abeng, a patient said that there were too many extra expenditures at the hospital.According to him not only were the drugs costly but that he was asked several times to buy assorted medications at the hospital’s pharmacy in a given day for his brother’s treatment.“My brother had limb fractures and the cost of the […]

John Abeng, a patient said that there were too many extra expenditures at the hospital.
According to him not only were the drugs costly but that he was asked several times to buy assorted medications at the hospital’s pharmacy in a given day for his brother’s treatment.
“My brother had limb fractures and the cost of the orthopaedic surgery has been out of this world. I’ve bought assorted drugs at different intervals today; the cost of hiring theatre cost me over N150,000. This excludes N300 cost of daily dressing of the injuries, buying other minor items like gloves, syringes, razor blade etc.
“I couldn’t imagine being asked to buy every single and smallest medical item which the hospital ought to provide. Everyday I spent over N1000 on these kinds of items”, he lamented.
Another woman, Mrs Josephine Roberts who stayed with her son in the casualty ward also lamented that whereas the staff nurses would dutifully attend to her son and other patients in the ward yet the doctors must always be persuaded to come and discharge their official functions.
She said that some days her son would not be given some specific  injections because the nurses would argue that they were not authorised to carry out that function even though they have learnt and know how to apply such injections.
“Doctors would only saunter in at their leisure only to be persuaded by the staff nurses to attend to the handful of their patients.”
In most of the wards there were few in-patients owing to the strike. In the emergency/accidents section, about eight casualty patients were seen.
Speaking to journalists last week on possible reasons for the situation, chairman of the UCTH association of resident doctors, Dr Agam Ayuk lamented that the hospital was not well funded by the federal government due to certain discrepancies.
He said; “The budgetary allocation of N20 million every year by the federal government to this hospital is grossly inadequate”.
Ayuk who insisted that members of his association will continue with internal industrial action until their salaries and entitlements in the last six months are paid, appealed for sustained funding of the hospital since it is one of the pilot medical centres in Nigeria.
Meanwhile, as a result of the strike, in the last two weeks when reporters took a closer observation at the goings-on the hospital, private security guards working at the E/A section told some journalists that no fewer than 30 very critical cases were turned back or refused admission into the hospital on the reason that the resident doctors could not attend to them because they were not paid five months salaries.
One of the medical staff who sought anonymity said that five such very critical cases died while being turned back early last week.