by Adeola Balogun
Photo:9jalife
According to reports, some family members of patients at the University of Calabar Teaching Hospital have had to take their own personal generators to the hospital due to epileptic electricity supply.
This was allegedly disclosed by workers at the hospital who also said that the continual theft of diesel meant for the hospital generator caused further hardship to the patients.
This, they said, was the reason why relatives who wanted their sick family members to get the necessary treatment had to come with generators to provide electricity.
A worker in the Accident and Emergency Unit of the hospital, who preferred anonymity, said those who siphoned the diesel did it at night, adding it was not possible for outsiders to carry out such act.
He also said as a result of the poor electricity supply, workers on night shift came to the hospital with their rechargeable lamps to carry out their duties.
He said, “Those who come to siphon the diesel at night are not strangers. They come with drums to take away diesel from the reservoir. As a result of that, we hardly have light when the public supply goes off. We are afraid to talk because we are public servants.
“But it is getting to the stage where we need to talk as it is affecting our work. We cannot work well in the dark. Most times, we just look at patients helplessly without being able to do much in the dark.”
Another female worker in the same unit, said a man recently lost his wife because there of power outage that lasted for hours while a caesarean operation was being carried out.
But the CMD of UCTH, Dr. Thomas Agan, told our reporter he was hearing about the theft for the first time.
Agan said he would summon the head of the works department to provide answers to the allegation. The CMD refuted the allegation of poor electricity supply and the use of lamps by medical personnel, saying the hospital had four functional generators, programmed to supply power to all the key units.
“It is not true that the relatives of patients come to the hospital with their generators. We have generators when there is no light from public source. There are four functional generators and they are always put to use,” he said.
Agan, had in May 2013 lamented that the sum of N12m was spent monthly on diesel out of the N12.5m the hospital gets as overhead from the federation account.
