LUTH remains open to patients – Management

• We are working,  CMD says

• Flays ‘disgruntled staff and miscreants’ who invaded the hospital on May 24

The Management of Lagos University Teaching Hospital (LUTH), Idi-Araba, announced on Friday  that the hospital  remains open to patients and members of the public in spite of the Wednesday May 24 protest by some aggrieved staff which forced the hospital to shut its gate temporarily to enforce peace.

The Chef Medical Director of the hospital, Prof. Chris Bode at a press conferences said the hospital’s 3000 workers had remained on their duty post even while the protest was on and had continued to attend to patients on a daily basis since then.

Bode said that the May 24 unrest was carried out by “about a dozen workers of the institution (who) tried to infiltrate the clinical space with miscreants and cause mayhem within the hospital.”

“As a  responsible organisation, we were constrained to respond robustly to the event for the benefit of our friends, stakeholders, partners and our citizens many of whom have called expressing anxiety on what they saw on the television and other media.

“I would therefore like to assure the general public, especially our patients, their relatives, clients and aspiring clients that LUTH is up and running and efficiently so. It is important to let you know that we did not stop work at anytime. Despite the unsuccessful attempts by a group of disgruntled  elements to disrupt our operations, our staff stood resolutely against the forces of retrogression,” he told the journalists.

The CMD traced the origin of the crisis to the inability of some union leaders to successfully get the workers to embark on strike actions since the government began the implementation of the ‘no work, no pay’ rule.

He noted that unlike in 2014 when the health workers stayed off duty for eight months and were paid by the government, there has been a drastic reduction in the number of strikes as workers no longer heed the call to abandon their work and patients for every flimsy reasons knowing they would not be paid for the period they are on strike.

According to him, being able to operate without frequent workers’ strikes has enabled the hospital to render uninterrupted services which had,  in turn, resulted in major achievements in recent times.

For instance, the CMD recounted, LUTH no longer bother to announce its successful open heart surgeries because “it’s now a routine,”  adding that the cardiac team had even performed eight open heart surgery shortly before “we were invaded by the rented crowd.”

“As I speak, we have a set of Siamese twins in this hospital. I won’t say more than that. We plan to operate them and will let you (the media) know when we have separated them.

“In LUTH today, we treat over 100 cancer patient at the only linear accelerator that is functioning in this country. Tunisia has more than 40 accelerators. Our country is making efforts to procure these very expensive but needed machines.

“About three months ago, we started a brand new laboratory in the Accident and Emergency (and) in the first 26 days of that lab, we made N14 million because people liked it. People who have laboratories along the road don’t like it and are now saying we pocket the money… the money goes to the TSA account. Also by August, our power plant will be up and running.

“But some people are not happy about these, especially because they can no more call strikes.  They want to go back to the old days of strikes. We are not on strike. LUTH is working and will continue to provide efficient and uninterrupted services to whoever comes to us,”  Prof. Bode further said.