The once vibrant health sector of Ondo State under former Governor Segun Mimiko is currently a shadow of itself, Starnews NG can report.
The government of Ondo State in the past seven years has turned the health sector into a private caricature like a one-man business of healthcare delivery. Drugs are not found in the hospitals, except you take your prescriptions outside to fill.
You will be shocked if you rush a patient on emergency to any of the health facilities across the three senatorial districts of the state. The situation is now worst. Across the state specialist hospitals, you can’t find functional oxygen, and generating plant!
Power supply is zero. No consumables! Many of the hospitals don’t have functional MRIs (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) and CT scans (computed tomography).
Getting the appropriate healthcare practitioner to respond to the emergency will be in vain. The majority of the doctors have japa (relocated abroad) while the current administration is lackadaisical to recruiting new hands. And the few doctors and nurses available are poorly remunerated, such that there is poor outcome of service delivery.
Pharmacists are dull as there are no drugs and medicaments with which to work and dispense to the few patients on admission and thousands that come as outpatients.
Minor surgeries like CS are now difficult to carry out, even in the glorious mother and child hospitals created for that purpose by the Mimiko government. Currently, the mother and child hospitals are now shadows and relics of the past.
The ministry of health is unable to manage effectively the laudable programmes and reforms put in place. Everything is dormant and docile in the ministry.
Starnews NG reports that ambulances in secondary health care facilities are no more functioning. The vehicles are all worn out and packed within the premises, and they are presently rotting away.
All these are happening because the health system is run like a private hospital from the days of the late Governor Rotimi Akeredolu, with the current governor doing nothing or little to put things in order.
For the avoidance of doubt, in all the states in the southwest Nigeria, Ondo State is the only state that does not constitute the hospital management board which has the primary mandate to provide health care services to the good people of the State through the management of Secondary Health facilities.
Similarly, the board of primary healthcare commission in Ondo State, which receives direct funding from the federal government through the national primary healthcare commission (NPHDC) is also not in place to formulate policy and run the commission as it should be. Monies allocated are syphoned away by stooges planted into the system by the late governor with reckless abandonment of health facilities.
It is our opinion that Governor Lucky Aiyedatiwa has consented to the continuous and reckless looting following his definite silence and failure to kick out the late Akeredolu’s stooge as Executive Secretary of the commission.
Aiyedatiwa has probably compromised with the continuously looting of monies they should have used to buy equipment, stock and maintain the various hospitals, or he simply lacks the capacity to fix the sector.
Primary healthcare centres across ondo state are in shambles. The tertiary healthcare suffers the same fate as the primary and secondary. The teaching hospital complex under construction has suffered a lot setbacks following the disappearance of contractors brought by the late Governor, and the incumbent governor has not been able to bring them back to site.
The university of medical sciences Ondo Kingdom is currently in crisis with the management being accused of bad management because there is no effective governing council to put things in shape.
It is indeed sad, this is not the best of time for the health sector in ondo state. Ondo state health sector remains a caricature of its old self.
We therefore call Governor Lucky Aiyedatiwa to declare a state of emergency in Ondo State health sector and constitute the management board with immediate alacrity to at least lessen the medical burden and arrest the excruciating sufferings and consequences on the people.
Leave a Reply