UCTH: Groping in the dark

This is due to constant public power outage and inability of the tertiary medical institution to run its own power system.A large part of the sprawling institution is also left without light in the night, leaving it at the sheer mercy of armed gangs and marauders who have constantly terrorised adjoining neighbourhoods. The chief medical […]

This is due to constant public power outage and inability of the tertiary medical institution to run its own power system.
A large part of the sprawling institution is also left without light in the night, leaving it at the sheer mercy of armed gangs and marauders who have constantly terrorised adjoining neighbourhoods.
The chief medical director, Dr Thomas Agan, had complained that the cost of buying petrol and diesel to power and maintain the giant generators everyday to supply constant light was beyond resources at his disposal. He had appealed for support from private sector, financially able individuals and government.
Only very few units of the hospital considered as critical, including the theatres, mortuary and laboratories seem to have independent power supply.
Even where there is supply, accident & emergency, male and female orthopaedic and children wards are not well illuminated because most of the bulbs and fluorescent light are dead.
A typical example is the male orthopaedic ward where out of the 24 fluorescent tubes, only one lights.
As a result of this, the doctors and nurses who grope in the dark are forced to depend on their handsets to identify patients and drugs. Often, as a result, they mistake one drug for another thereby endangering the patients’ lives.
If identifying patients is herculean task for doctors and nurses, most wards at UCTH are like market places.
With too many and uncontrolled visitors, there seems to be no regulation at all. People flood into these wards in the guise of coming to see their patients. Visiting time of 4pm to 6pm is never respected. And ward management and security personnel, if any, don’t bother.
This has exposed patients to risks as no one verifies the motives of the army of visitors. Anyone could just walk in and harm any patients and sneak off scot-free.
Patients themselves bring their lighting or are forced to buy rechargeable lamps but they are stingy with their use, since no one is certain about availability of power to recharge them.
They therefore refuse to switch them on to illuminate the large hall except when they have personal reasons to do so.
There are 32 beds in the male ward, for instance. Some of the in-patients have one or two relatives that attend to them and also sleep in the ward. Some of these patients have moved their entire household kitchen items into the ward.
Result is their population generates another kind of trouble: heat, since the fans don’t work. This alongside mosquitoes further pose another health risks.
One of the orthopaedic patients, 29-year-old Henry Eteng could not fathom why such a mighty hospital can be run without light especially at night.
“With a huge population of patients of differing ailments and degrees of pains, injuries and health conditions, it is extremely dangerous to abandon them in such pitch darkness,” he said, adding that the nurses had once injected him a wrong drug by mistake.
Some head staff spoken to who pleaded not to be named said they have on many occasions made reports to relevant authorities of the hospital and also made requests for the dead bulbs to be replaced to no avail.
For instance, the officer said: “You can see that in the male ward there is no water supply from the taps, leading to sanitation challenge. They are yet to answer us. Patients and their relatives continually mess up the conveniences because of lack of running water.”