The only thing that can compare to a Government tertiary hospital is waiting to be captured for the FRSC Driver’s license and the wait is real!
If you know no body there, you will have to wake up as early as 5:00 am to get to the hospital latest by 7:00 am; surprisingly the idea was not yours alone as you will meet a crowd.
You then take your card to retrieve your folder and pray in your heart that your folder is intact. In some cases your folder may be missing and all medical records lost and there is nothing you can do about it. You can spend minutes to hours in this station.
You then go to the nurses station to get your vitals checked but of course you must wait for your turn. This can take minutes to hours as only 2 nurses which is a very generous number will take the vital signs of hundreds of patients.
You then wait to see the doctor and you notice you are number 30. You see the door to the consulting room but seeing and getting inside is a different kettle of fish. After waiting for hours you see the doctor, who will likely see you for 15 minutes maximum.
He also has to see Patient number 50 and it’s 12 noon already. You notice that he is alone, you hear him talk about salaries to another doctor that walked inside. From their discussion you discover he has not been paid for months. He orders some investigations for you in the laboratory and writes some drugs for you to buy.
You get to the laboratory by 1:00 pm it is located more than 1 km from the clinic. But by the time you get there, the crowd waiting to pass through the single door is more in number than the sick people that littered the pool of Bethesda. A famished and angry looking receptionist barely looks at you and tells you to come the next day, you are so tired to even argue.
You get to the pharmacy, everyone in the hospital buys drugs there. The crowd there is more than the number you met in the laboratory, only 2 pharmacists are attending to the crowd. As you wait you begin to feel very dizzy. It finally gets to your turn and after waiting you discover they do not have some drugs in the prescription and you will need to buy it outside the hospital.
You leave the hospital by 4:00 pm, you virtually spent your whole day there, you get home feeling very tired. When you get home, you put on your television and hear that a rich man been tried for financial issues and been held in prison is seeking for medical treatment abroad.
Your head is banging, the stress of going to the hospital is even worse than the condition you went to treat in the hospital and the stress will kill you faster than your ill health. You forget taking your drug and sleep off. In the midst of your sleep you dream and you find your self with the Minister of Science and technology.
In the dream, you tell him to collaborate with the ministry of health and ICT companies and develop software and programmes that will contain the data of all the patients in the hospital, so that instead of going to waste your time collecting folders when you get to the hospital, with one click and a code, all your information will be on a laptop in the doctors office.
You also tell him to link up the laboratory , pharmacy and other units to the doctor so results can be sent to him directly and he can communicate with them in real time…as you are about to say more things, you also beg him to inform the Minister of Health that the hospital needs more hands
You wake up with a fever… and decide not to go back to the hospital again.
True story
Hahahaha
Sad reality.
We have a short way to go.
Mtchewwwwe
After narrating my experiences, only 3 out of countless ones to a former commissioner for health, he asked me, whose story is this again, and I replied, mine
He was speechless
What I termed serious ordeals was because I am in the system
Imagine those who are just simply patients and patient relative
A few days ago, bcoz of nhis, I lost my control and threatened to slap the hell out of a staff
You won’t understand the meaning of desperation until someone tells you at 1am in the morning there is no bronchodilator in the hospital or you need to sign a form to do FBc and no staff to sign it and your sample is just staring at you
Just maybe, there should be a law forbidding political office holders leaving the country for their health needs
They should come and be bitten by mosquitoes and their relatives should sleep on the floor outside the hospital and their samples will get missing in the lab and of course their folders will disappear from records when they come for check up
God Bless the writer!
Wow am thanking God for divine health right now, ve never experienced this but dts bcos ‘ve never been hospitalized. Weldone sir, I hope our gov’t look into the health sector
The struggle is real. Sometimes I don’t blame our people for not seeking medical attention for their condition early. Even I don’t do that because of the situation in our public hospitals. And I’m a doctor.