Our Greatest Problem at COOUTH is Electricity – Akabuike (Part 2)

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Our Greatest Problem at COOUTH is Electricity

 

In this concluding part of the interview with Fides Editor-in-Chief, Jude Atupulazi, the COOUTH CMD, Dr Joseph Akabuike, x-rays the journey so far and reveals the challenges facing the institution

Excerpts

Talking about training, those trainees, can you throw some light?

People should understand very clearly, we have two sets of students: medical students – these students are managed in the university. They have to continue their lessons in the university until they come up to, maybe, fourth year, then the teaching hospital has to manage them. The medical students don’t touch any patient.

They can only be guided by a doctor. Then the next set of doctors on training are the resident doctors. They are the doctors that are training for a specialist course after they might have been trained as general practitioners. After the first year, they do their housemanship, and NYSC.

Then if you are interested, you come back, especially if you’re interested in being a surgeon. And then when you enter surgery, there are so many areas you can enter – orthopedics, Urology, Neuro-Surgery and others. So they’re all lined up like that. Then next group is those resident doctors who have about five years or more to finish their programmes before they become consultants.

We often hear about doctors complaining about their remuneration, how happy are your doctors here?

The issue of remuneration is everywhere. Relatively our doctors are doing very well; they are not complaining. When you see the recent thing that is happening now, few have cause to complain if you know the value of what you have.

But relatively, we are at par with other teaching hospitals in the country. The payment is what we call CONHES and CONMES and this is different from what is being paid at the state level. A staff of level nine here may be earning more than level eleven with same staff outside here.

I recall that there was something you once said about your mortuary about beefing it up to standard or something like that…

Yes, that is one of the areas we felt concerned and we have thrown in a lot of weight. When I came in we discovered that bodies were scattered, not in a proper way. But if you go to our mortuary now, I was jokingly telling somebody that you go there and take siesta because we have now built a kind of platform where we put bodies in body bags. You can open them and see the people there.

We also have a cooling system, the one we use a refrigerator without having to embalm. We even have executive places for people of high level, because if somebody like the Royal Highness of a town or ex-governor or commissioner dies, you can’t scatter them with other bodies. So, we still carry that respect to them unto death. So, we have special places for them.

So you have VIP mortuary?

Yes, we do. You can go in there and I’m sure you will like to sleep there (laughs)

Sometimes, we get reports of mutilation of bodies in mortuaries by people who sell parts, has there been any complaint of such here?

We do not have any complaint of such because such can only happen in a small setting. The process of putting a corpse and getting it out of our mortuary is not very simple. Everything we have there is automated. So when somebody brings a corpse you have to register it in a system and you have to give the corpse a tag.

Then we now receive the corpse and start taking care of it. We do not release a corpse to anybody that is not the same person that put it, because you have to bring that card and when you bring the card we crosscheck it with the name. And you cannot access our mortuary. You cannot just say you want to go and see anybody. On the date you will be coming to take the body, you have to bring that tag and they will identify you and then you will go with our mortician.

And of course, nobody stays there more than one minute. So, it has never happened. One of the things that happen in mortuaries is misplacement of corpses. When they embalm them they can mix them up. Here they are numbered and tagged and registered serially, so we don’t have such experience here.

Why are some bodies embalmed and some refrigerated?

It depends on choice; the simple thing there is that we do not want the corpse to decay. But usually, embalming is cheaper. They put chemicals in the blood vessels and circulate them all over and the body dries and remains there. If it is refrigeration, we cool the body at certain temperature that living organisms cannot enter it and it prevents it from infection. It requires light and refrigeration. So, most often, it is cheaper for people to accept embalming than to accept the cooling system.

Are those who prefer to go for cooling system not disappointed because there is not always light?

There is a supporting generator for that, and because of the cost, they don’t stay long. If somebody has a body that will stay for one month, two months, that will be too expensive, but we have been using it, instead, as a bridge, because at times, people bring bodies from abroad. And you cannot embalm a body that has stayed on transit, maybe two or three days. It has been very perfect for that purpose.

Does the body change? I ask this because sometimes it appears to be too dark that you hardly even recognize the person.

In terms of changes, it is worse with embalmment than with refrigeration because of the processes involved.

On a lighter note, is it really true that dead bodies get funny; maybe they communicate and scare people in the night? How true are such stories?

We have not seen one and my people have not actually complained of such. I think that is the story I have been hearing from infancy. Then when someone died we would not cross that side again in three months.

So, in the past three years, what would you say is your biggest achievement?

One of the things, apart from infrastructure, is that we have restructured this place to be a teaching hospital. When I came, the resident doctors had only one senior registrar. When I came we restructured the whole training system and we were able to produce 12 within these three years.

In the next three years, these 12 will become consultants and this is a very big achievement, particularly now we have brain drain. One of the things we have done is that all these infrastructure that we have put up, before now, doctors were sitting inside their cars but now we have a very comfortable consultancy room fully air conditioned.

We have gotten accreditation of six departments to train doctors. So these are what we are trying to do to make the teaching hospital what it should be. The taste of the pudding is in the eating. The number of people coming to this hospital has increased astronomically.

What are the major issues you would like the government and individuals to come and assist?

Teaching hospital or hospital is made for everybody, and anybody can do anything that can improve any hospital, particularly the government owned, in saving a lot of people. One of the greatest things we will want government to do, which they are doing here, is improvement in infrastructure. Then, another one is the issue of light. The greatest challenge we have is the issue of light.

Three years ago we were paying about three million Naira monthly and about last year (2023) it went up further but now it is about N19.8 million. It tends to sap every money we have and this reflects eventually on the bills. We’ve been able to take care of water and others but light is very important.

So if there is anything to be done it is light. Even now, we are bringing solar system to augment it. We have it where we put babies in incubators. We have it in the private ward and we have it in the laboratory and we’re extending it to the hostels that are occupied by house officers. These are the things we are trying to do to reduce our power consumption from the EEDC (Enugu Electricity Distribution Company).

What is your vision for the hospital?

My vision for the hospital is what I have just said; that the hospital should be a reference point, it should be a tourist place where everything that is needed to get somebody healed is there. So it will now begin to attract people, both home and abroad, so this place becomes a centre of excellence and also becomes part of the vision of the Governor to make Anambra State a livable place and what it should be, comparable to any developed place in the world.

So what percentage can you score yourself?

It is not easy to give oneself a score because score is a reference point, and I think we have done fairly well as you can see; more is still needed to be done.

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