My phone beeped at 1 a.m. The text message from my sister was brief: “Daddy is in the hospital.”
A quick call established that they had spent the past five hours trying to get my 65-year-old dad – who had severe headache and delirium – admitted into the emergency ward of a government hospital in Lagos.
My father is a doctor who has given over 35 years of his life to the Nigerian healthcare system. Yet, he was at the brink of death – not because his ailment was incurable but because treatment was being delayed with hurdles set by poor hospital management and lack of staffing.
When he was finally admitted, he was put on an unclean bed without a bedspread. A hospital staff member screamed at the family to get their own bedspread, as there was none available due to crowding in the wards.
We could explain this away by saying “It’s the pandemic”. But Nigerians will tell you that this is a common occurrence in many government and primary healthcare centres in Nigeria.
Nigeria has a deficit in the number of qualified doctors: the country needs about 237,000 doctors to ensure the population’s health needs are catered for but currently has only about 35,000. Each day it loses doctors to foreign hospitals, as they leave in search of better salaries or, given the number of unpaid staff, any salary at all.
In addition, our healthcare system already struggles with more patients than hospital beds – which was true even before the pandemic. Compared to the global average of 26 hospital beds per 10,000 people, we have just five. We are talking of about just 134,000 beds to a population of 211 million people. The United Kingdom, which has less than half of Nigeria’s population with just 68 million people, can boast of over 170,548 hospital beds.
The COVID-19 pandemic is not to blame for the state of our hospitals or how we treat patients. The pandemic has merely opened our eyes to the preexisting problems.
And one of these is proper hospital management.