- Has UNTH truly gone to dust?
It used to be described and indeed designated as a centre of medical excellence in Nigeria. Today, no one is sure anymore. Not many can vouch for the excellence of the over 50-year-old University of Nigeria Teaching Hospital (UNTH) in Enugu State. Until the recent past, it used to be the pride of the east.
Apart from earning pre-eminence in heart ailments, including open heart surgery, any case which defied physicians anywhere in the east of Nigeria was referred to UNTH. The mere knowledge that a complex ailment had found space in UNTH would give patients a certain placebo-effect of relief.
However, the report out of Ituku-Ozalla, the abode of the sprawling hospice cum institution of medical sciences, is quite unbecoming of the noble profession of medicine. The Association of Resident Doctors (ARDs) at UNTH during a press briefing last week, told the world that the complex is better off shut down than to pretend to be operational though its management systems had collapsed.
In their words: “We have decided to embark on an indefinite strike over the entire failure in the system. The aims for which this tertiary hospital was established which is service, research and training have failed totally. UNTH being on strike is better. The hospital has been turned to a money collecting centre where patients are made to pay for oxygen when they did not use same.
“In times of emergency, common investigations like HB, CT scan, blood banks tests cannot be done in the hospital. Patients are made to travel 20 km to private hospitals in the metropolis to do these tests which compound a simple ailment to a complex one. In (some) cases patients die as a result.
“We carry out surgeries with torch and candle lights following power failure and dysfunctional generators. It is only the poorest of the poor that come to UNTH as a last resort…”
Though there has not been any refutation from the UNTH authorities, the allegations are too grievous to be ignored and that they would emanate at all from the quarters of UNTH suggests a thoroughly deprecated situation. Even downtown clinics would never carry out surgical procedures under such conditions as described by the ARDs above.
If the assertions of the ARDs are true by any margin, then we dare say that UNTH is in itself, in dire need of an emergency ‘surgical’ procedure that must be comprehensive and total. It means that the citadel of medical training and specialist medicare has gone to the dogs and is in need of urgent retrieval.
We urge the federal government to immediately set up an enquiry to determine the true state of affairs at the institution: when the rot set in; the root causes and why. It is also important to find out what level of funding has been availed the institution in the past five years for instance and what manner of management has been at the helm over this period. We must also remark that a few Federal Medical Centres have been in the doldrums with management at loggerheads with staff.
The odious news coming from UNTH is not about the ARDs or the management of the UNTH; it is about Nigeria and her essence as an organic member of the human community. Medicine is standardized practice; a heart procedure in Nigeria, for instance, is the same anywhere on the globe. We cannot hope to earn the respect and regard of other peoples of the world if we allow a certain level of degeneracy to pervade important affairs of our lives. Is there a chance that the Federal Ministry of Health is on vacation?
