At UCH’s Accident And Emergency Unit, It’s One Doctor to 50 Patients daily —CMD, Professor Otegbayo

The Chief Medical Director of the University College Hospital (UCH), Ibadan, Professor Jesse Otegbayo, in this interview by SADE OGUNTOLA, speaks on how the federal health institution is faring, its feats and challenges, especially in caring for accident victims and emergency patients.

A recent media report had it that a patient died at the Accident and Emergency Unit of the UCH, Ibadan, after the patient was left unattended for about 12 hours. Would you say this happened because the hospital is overwhelmed?

 The report you mentioned cannot be true. UCH, Ibadan, is not a killer-institution. We have a mandate to treat and to heal. Let us look at the circumstances surrounding what was published. It said that they were told to wait. Immediately anybody arrives at our Accident and Emergency Unit, no matter how many people are there, there is an officer designated to look at them and see how critical their situation is. The person will report to the doctor on duty.

Regarding that particular case, in fact, at a point, they were treating them in the car but they realised that this was not ideal and was not yielding a good result. Again, we usually don’t turn patients back but with the way things are now, we may have to start doing that. Let me say that UCH, Ibadan, takes care of primary, secondary and tertiary health-care cases whereas our sole mandate is supposed to be tertiary health-care cases.

But because there is no other place to go for the kind of conditions people have, when many of them come in, we have to take all of them. The population of Ibadan is over six million, UCH is the only teaching hospital in the city and it serves the whole nation, so to say. We receive patients from Maiduguri, Kano, Sokoto and so on. The population of London is 8.9 million. They have 12 teaching hospitals, apart from the tertiary health institutions that are private. Therefore, you cannot really expect us to attend to patients the way they treat there.

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