The dust raised by the recent nocturnal visit of the newly elected state governor of Ogun State, Dapo Abiodun, to the Olabisi Onabanjo Teaching Hospital in Sagamu penultimate weekend has not settled, as accusing fingers are being pointed in different directions as to who and what the fundamental issues are.
The Governor, who claimed that his visit had been triggered by hints on the sorry state of the facility and lamented while there that: “I thought I should come here to see things for myself. This place is substandard, I am going to sit down and look at how best this place would start working perfectly.
“It is worse than deplorable and I intend to immediately put together a team of consultants and members of the sector after I get a formal report from the medical director and his team. I would set up a team to immediately begin how to look at the approach that would make this place functional as it should be.”
“This hospital at a point in time was one of the best university teaching hospitals in this country and its Faculty of Medicine was number one in the country, but today we have lost the reputation.
“This visit was informed by my meeting with sector heads in the Ministry of Health like the Permanent Secretary, medical directors of different hospitals and the members of the management board.”
Meanwhile one of the key staff of the institution who would not want to be named for obvious reasons confided in our reporters that there has been upheaval at different levels of management of the OOUTH since the unscheduled visit and most of the key perpetuators of the evil that befell the institution are very uneasy.
He told our reporter that;“It is high time for total overhauling of OOUTH Sagamu, the health institution not only in a deplorable state but derailed from its core mandate. The management also presently lacks administrative capacity/capacity of leadership. The interference of immediate past commissioner of health Dr.Babatunde Ipaye who usurped the power of the hospital governing board that was not constituted deliberately for almost four years is also a major part of the issue.
“There is also the issue of selection of CMD,CMAC,DAs which has been the responsibility of the former commissioner rather than taking care of secondary and primary health institutions in the state. Worst of it, was posting out of senior experienced members of staff to primary health care centres out of victimization. For example, senior medical laboratory scientists (a Director, Medical Laboratory Services, a Chief Medical Laboratory Scientist and an Assistant Chief Medical Laboratory Scientist) were posted out to where they were not needed despite acute shortage manpower in the hospital medical laboratory directorate.
“This came as a result of legal victory by chapter AMLSN (Association of Medical Laboratory Scientists of Nigeria) against the pathologists over the headship of medical laboratory directorate which court pronounced in favour of Medical Laboratory Scientists.”
Our source further revealed that the management placed a ban of some sort on the employment of medical laboratory scientists in last ten years rather they kept recruiting medical laboratory technicians who are of lower cadre in the profession due to limitation of their train but with proviso to bastardise the profession without looking at patients benefit and hospital output interns of diagnosis.
The new stand of the present government to constitute an enquiry into the rot and rejig the process meant that a lot of top officials would be called to question and may face stiff penalty when their true part in the deterioration of the system comes to fore.
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