It’s quite pandemonium the fate of health care management in Yobe State.
Yesterday night, I was in Specialist Hospital Potiskum, where I takes my mother as an emergency patient, owing to the related cardiac murmur she is suffering that results to laying her down to bed. I went straightly to OPD department of the Hospital – from my previous experiences with the hospital I knows that there was a trained medical Doctors that were rendering the night duty. Ironically, I found non among them, one security personnel referred us to Emergency Unit, where is the one and only department that are offering a night duties.
We stepped in to the Emergency Unit by twenty-minutes-to-nine unfortunately there’s no doctor on the consulting seat, but a one poor-trained nurse who was busy with friends, he cares neither out-patient nor emergency’s one. I went to him earnestly and briefed him on my patients but he didn’t attend us but told us to wait outside. Is waiting part of emergency treatment!
After I put pressurized him, by taking off my sunglass and frown he told me that the doctor that would deliver the night duties is yet to arrive while the one that rendered one is out. We have to wait until his arrival!
It’s almost nine o’clock when I was busy with my patients by sharing some phycological therapy which I learnt in medical school, I acknowledge the arrival of this chesty quack that is living in the delusion of prefixing the ‘Dr.’ in his name without knowing do and don’t of the profession, our patient’s folder is the one first on his table, but he turned them up-to-down. We have to wait ahead!
While consulting my patients i was amazed on how as learned as he is (Medical Doctor) would be arrogantly against all the fourteen modes of counseling, is this young man passed his ‘Medical Sociology’ examination?
He carelessly scribbles on prescription sheet without analysing delve on diagnosis and handed over to us.
He called the next patient without given us the conclusion.
Similarly, I was at Emergency Unit of Specialist Hospital Damaturu, two months ago when we evacuated the victims of building collapse due to the heavy downpour that resulted to flooding in various axis of Yobe State. We were less than a fortunate of meeting another ill-experience-cum-chesty Medical Doctor, the young man was busy to the extent that he can’t spare his time to prescribe the appropriate mandatory tests for good examination, whenever patient bleeds; there’s need to determine the Pack Cell Volume (PCV) of the patient, to my all surprise this young Doctor prescribed Malaria Parasite, Widal, and Hemoglobin Count. My entourage who happened to be a lecturer with the college of medical science suggest that; the PCV of the patient should be determine, so as to know how to compensate the loss deftly if need arises.
It’s quite alarming that; patient are dying in the hands of poorly trained medical personnels. The Hospitals managements and Ministry of Health must sit-up and address the matter by attaching the newly employed graduates of medicine to the learned resident doctors.
Experience is the best teacher!
