Federal Neuropsychiatric Hospital, Enugu, the only health institution meant to take care of mentally ill patients in the South East has called on the federal government to urgently employ and deploy clinical staff to the hospital.
This is as there had been massive exodus of its core clinical staff, with the hospital now burdened with serious core clinic staff shortage, while the number of its patients keep increasing daily.
Medical Director of the hospital, Dr Monday Igwe, made this revelation in Enugu on Sunday, said it has been difficult getting approval for the replacement of doctors and nurses who had either travelled abroad, resigned or retired.
“We have a challenge of the exit of core clinical staff and it has been difficult getting approval to replace the core clinical staff.
“Many of our staff have been going abroad, doctors, nurses; some resigning, some retiring and even death. We need to replace them since we are having an ever increasing number of patients coming to the hospital daily,’’ he said.
According to him, this era of difficulties, depression, suicide attempts and drug abuse have made the hospital to have increased number of patients.
“So we clearly have an upsurge in number of patients and very few professionals taking care of them. We direly need more professional clinical staff to meet up with this upsurge,” he said.
