The Management of University of Uyo Teaching Hospital (UUTH) has promised to provide skeletal services during the duration of the JOHESU nationwide strike.
Dr Isaac Udo, the Acting Chief Medical Director of the Hospital, said this during an interaction with newsmen in Uyo on Wednesday.
Udo explained that he has secured the cooperation of all doctors in the institution to give their best to ensure that patients are attended to.
He added that strategies have been put in place to ensure that the strike does not adversely affect operations in the hospital.
He said only patients considered as emergency cases would be attended to while those who are not seriously ill would be sent home.
Udo noted that though the strike has affected activities in the hospital, the management would do all within its power to handle the situation.
“It is true there is a strike by JOHESU and it affects the UUTH. For the duration of the strike, there will be skeletal services, not full services.
“We have had series of meetings with all the units in the hospital, the heads of departments of those units and all the doctors.
“The meetings were aimed at drawing up strategies to ensure that we continue to render some services to patients and the public.
“We have made all arrangements; how we will get the health records out, how we will attend to patients and carry out investigations for the patients in the labs.
“We have also drawn up another strategy in case that plan fails, we can look for outside sources to help. We have done an internal arrangement so that there is electricity and water.
“All the doctors have gone out to the relevant clinical areas, those patients who are strong enough to go home have been sent home while those patients who are not strong enough to go home, arrangements have been made to take care of them.
“For the new patients, arrangement have been made that those who are really ill will be taken care of, at least some emergency services will be rendered to them.
“But there is a limit to which we can do those things. But once we have satisfactorily done the initial things and we cannot proceed beyond there, we will inform the patients on what next to do.
“The doctors will run a shift to make sure that even at night, they can attend to patients. I have the cooperation of the doctors and they have promised to work,” Udo said.
He noted that in the past, the health sector has been operating without strike and called on the Federal Government to take lasting steps to end the recurring problems affecting the health sector in the country.
“The government needs to go back to the root cause of these strikes, look at it again and see what has to be done.
“The health sector has always been existence in Nigeria and there was peace. In the past, you hardly hear of strike in the hospital.
“So it is for government to sit down and re-examine what went wrong along the line and see how it can be corrected. Things went wrong and led to another until it piled up,” he said.
In Ibadan, healthcare workers at the University College Hospital (UCH) have joined the strike.
The workers said they were complying with a directive issued by their secretariat via a communiqué signed by Messrs Biobelemo Josiah and Florence Ekpebor, National Chairman and National General Secretary, respectively.
A report from Delta also says health workers at the Federal Medical Centre (FMC), Asaba, have joined the strike in compliance with the national body’s order.
The Medical Director of the centre, Dr Victor Osiatuma, confirmed the development on Wednesday in Asaba.
Osiatuma however urged the striking workers to consider the plight of patients and suspend the industrial action.
A NAN reporter who visited the hospital observed that doctors were seen in their offices, but there were very few patients at the hospital.
A patient, Mrs Obiageli Okafor, said that she came for an ante-natal clinic.
Okafor said that she was attended to by a doctor but there was no nurse to provide service.
She said she had to carry out some of the services usually provided by the nurses.
She prayed that the strike action should end soonest. (NAN)
