- Could this be evidence of lax monitoring and control?
Nigeria needs about 237,000 doctors to meet the World Health Organization (WHO) recommendation but has only about 35,000. That is; instead of WHO’s recommendation of one doctor to 600 patients, Nigeria has a ratio of one doctor to 6,000 patients. Coming from the Head of the Ear, Nose and Throat (ENT) Department, University of Abuja, Professor Titus Ibekwe, we can take this as the gospel truth, and it is most discomfiting.
We wonder in what area of life the country has met global standards, considering that even in terms of policing, it has far less number of policemen than she required. Given the doctor-patient ratio, it is obvious that the country has an acute shortage of medical doctors.
This is probably part of what some people have exploited to set up illegal hospitals where they carry out nefarious medical services, including surgeries. Although, as with many other places without standards, or with lax regulatory activities, Nigeria also parades a lot of fake journalists, fake lawyers, etc., but the medical profession is the last place to condone fake doctors because it deals essentially with human lives.
This danger was exemplified by the arrest of one fake medical doctor on November 3 by policemen from the Criminal Investigation Department (CID), Iyaganku, Ibadan, Oyo State. The arrest followed a report on the activities of fake doctors by the Oyo State Task Force on Private Health Facilities in Ibadan. The task force officials, acting on a tip-off, went to the hospital at about 11.00 a.m. and found five patients on admission. The fake doctor had performed surgical operations on two of them for fibroid and appendicitis.
This is confounding in the sense that it was the third time that the fake doctor would be arrested. He had been arrested in 2008 and 2010, for medical malpractices and for training quack nurses. According to the chairman of the task force, Dr Adebisi Ayoola: “We were at the hospital on routine investigation, and we found he was still doing the same thing which he had been cautioned against in the past. This time around, what we found was an eyesore. There were five patients on admission in the hospital, and out of the five, two had been operated upon.”
The shocker: “There was a woman who said she was referred to the hospital for fibroid. When we examined her, we found out that the fibroid was still intact, even after the surgery, meaning that what he did was just to open up the woman and close her back.”
Perhaps nothing could be more callous. The task force chairman continued: “Another woman had also been there for the past few months with fracture of the right thigh bone. This is beyond his capacity to handle. There is no single qualified nurse in the hospital; this means that he was actually training auxiliary nurses.”
We wonder, just as Dr Ayoola did, how many unlucky patients would have died in the hands of this fake doctor. The tragedy becomes compounded when it is realised that there are many such people out there gambling with people’s lives. Just last year, one Julius Afolabi, the self-acclaimed Medical Director of Adeolu Afolabi Clinic and Maternity Home in the Abule-Iroko area of Ota, Ogun State, was also arrested by the police, after failing to successfully carry out a fibroid operation for which he had allegedly been paid N200,000.
Anyone with respect for the sanctity of human lives must be worried about the activities of these callous characters. It beats our imagination that just anyone can set up a clinic or hospital and be operating, sometimes for years before being apprehended. What are the regulatory agencies doing? In the particular case of the fake doctor in Ibadan, how was he able to return to ‘practice’ after being arrested twice? Could some people have been compromised along the line of duty? Nigerians deserve answers to these questions, and probably more.
His staff who tried to shield him from arrest before he was located in his hideout in the hospital should also be arrested and interrogated. They are probably in the illegality together. But beyond all these, there is need for the public to be aware of how to detect fake hospitals. The government should also make healthcare accessible and affordable if we are to stop the activities of these quacks.
