Poor staff attitude causing deaths in hospitals – CMD

The Chief Medical Director (CMD) of the University of Calabar Teaching Hospital, Prof Thomas Agan, has said that the rate at which patients die these days at government tertiary health institutions has become alarming.

Agan who the chairman of the Committee of CMDs/ directors of Federal Tertiary Institutions in Nigeria, spoke with journalists in Calabar, saying doctors and other health personnel had abandoned federal health facilities to establish their own.

“The patients is number who die of or are referred to our private health setups is outrageous. As I speak to you now, a lot of people in radiology department have opened X-ray departments, scan departments, radiology departments, CT scanning outside federal health institutions. If you go to the hospital clinics you hardly find them, including consultants. Is that not attitude? It’s attitude. My prayer is that we should have a turn around so that tomorrow we are not embarrassed,” Prof Agan said.

He also decried the attitude of doctors, saying it was contributing tremendously to the increase in deaths of patients.

“The major problem we have in this country with rendering services to the patients is our attitude. The attitude of the health care givers to the patients and the attitude of the patients to their health leave so much to be desired.

Over 90 percent of deaths in our hospitals are due to our attitude. Until the healthcare givers in our hospitals begin to realize that the health of the patient he/ she is handling could be his own, his wife or siblings, things will not go well. Until we realize that we would be held accountable to every challenge we create, things will not go down well,” he said.