…narrates how doctors, nurses ignored him till he breathed his last
A Lagos-based public affairs analyst, Mr. Adebayo Adesanya, has accused the management of the State Hospital, Ijebu Ode, Ogun State, of negligence, saying that the lackadaisical attitude of the medical staff led to the death of his 69-year-old father, Mr. Victor Adesanya, at the health facility.
Pa Adesanya, a retiree, was diagnosed with stroke in 2009, but with visits to his physiotherapists, he was able to manage, to a great extent, until he fell ill in March and later died at the General Hospital, while undergoing treatment.
But his son, Yemi, said that the management and workers at the hospital should be blamed for his father’s death.
According to him, there was no doctor on duty to attend to his father when he suddenly fell ill and was rushed to the hospital on an emergency.
He said, “On Wednesday, March 14, 2018, my dad’s brother called me from Ijebu Ode that he (my dad) was stooling and vomiting. I instructed them to give him the ORT therapy, which they said they did, but when we noticed that his condition was not improving, as he could not talk again, we decided to rush him to the nearest hospital to his house, which was the Ijebu Ode General Hospital.
“We got to the emergency section at 12.30 midnight. When we got there, we cried for help from the nurses on duty; they brought out a stretcher, brought him down from the car and wheeled him into the emergency building. We called for the doctors to attend to him, but they told us that there was none available. They told us that one had gone to other wards on the upper floor to attend to some other patients, who had emergency issues. We requested for another doctor to come and attend to my dad, but we were told the hospital had only one resident doctor.”
He added, “How on earth could that be? A public hospital meant to serve millions of residents in a state having just one resident doctor? All the while, my dad was getting weaker and weaker, staring into the dark sky, though breathing, because we were checking his pulse and we saw his breathing reflexes.
“We also called on nurses at the emergency centre to at least give him some sort of first aid, but all our pleas fell on deaf ears as the nurses told us they could not do anything until the doctor was around. After waiting for about 40 minutes, the doctor came, examined my dad and, after a while, pronounced him dead!”
He alleged that the doctor did not attempt to perform a CPR on his dad when he noticed that he had no breath pulse.
The doctor, he further alleged, only walked away, leaving his dad on a stretcher.
”It is high time the government looked into the public hospitals. The alarming rate of negligence at these hospitals is rampant,” he said.
Efforts by our correspondent to get the reaction of the hospital’s Chief Medical Director, Dr. (Mrs.) Oluseyi Adetola, to the aggrieved son’s allegations proved abortive.
She did not pick calls made to her phone and did not also reply text messages sent to her.
