Leonardo Da Vince, an Italian polymath, was among the first set of people who conceptualised the idea of a flying object with his design of a “flying machine”, which did not work as envisaged, but signalled the beginning of what we now know as aviation. However, another of his designs metamorphosed into the popular helicopter of today. Between da Vince’s pioneering designs and December 17, 1903, when the Wright brothers, Orville and Wilbur, made the first attempt at flying, many individuals had also made several failed attempts at designing and actualising the idea of a flying object.
Since humans can be said to have conquered the skies, many air crashes and incidents have occurred, and will continue to occur. In fact, the most devastating aviation disaster in human history was when two aircraft, a KLM Boeing 747, which was attempting to take off, collided with another taxing Pan Am Boeing 747 at the Los Rodeos Airport on Canary Island of Tenerife, Spain, on March 27, 1977, killing a total of 538 passengers on board both aircraft.
In aviation accidents and incidents, pilot error is said to account for 53 per cent, while mechanical failure and weather conditions account for 21 per cent and 11 per cent respectively.
Just like it is in aviation still considered the safest mode of travelling, so it is in the Nigerian health sector where doctor error has led to the death and permanent disability of countless number of Nigerians.
On December 31, 1983, when the then Major-General Muhammadu Buhari-led military junta kicked out the Shehu Shagari-led civilian administration from Dodan Barracks, Obalande, Lagos, Buhari told a bewildered nation in his first speech as the head of state that the “inept” Shagari government had turned public hospitals to “mere consulting clinics”. Unfortunately, more than 40 years down the lane, some of our hospitals, both public and private, are no longer “mere consulting clinics” but are now slaughter slabs with some doctors turning butchers-in-charge. Indeed, many a Nigerian doctor is now like Riva de Biasio, a psychopath, deformed and scary-looking character and serial killer in Venice, California, U.S., who gruesomely murdered and mutilated young women and children in public locations and whose heinous and heart-wrenching activities were captured in the classic novel, “The Butcher of Venice” by Irmgard Rawn.
Some of them, and their nurses, are also badly attitudinally-challenged that you will regret coming to them for treatment.
Despite this hopeless situation we found ourselves, however, a lot of our doctors are still highly professional, meticulous and very brilliant and precise in carrying out their duties.
The crass incompetence and chicanery of the guilty doctors and nurses in the Nigerian health sector did not just start today. About 30 years ago, a friend and senior photojournalist in one of the newspapers told me how his wife strongly insisted that her baby was swapped after delivery at one of the leading hospitals in Lagos, because, according to her, she knew she delivered a baby girl, but was given a baby boy when she eventually became conscious after childbirth. And this kind of evil practice still continues unabated in many of our hospitals. No wonder there has been an alarming surge in DNA crises in the country.
Also, many of our doctors and misdiagnosis are like five and six. For instance, renowned Lagos lawyer and rights activist, the late Chief Gani Fawehinmi (SAN), who died on September 5, 2009, after a prolonged battle with long cancer, was initially misdiagnosed of sore throat and cough in Nigeria before he was correctly diagnosed of lung cancer abroad when it was already too late and the cancer had spread all over his body. Too bad that thousands of such cases happen daily in the country and are never reported.
Many Nigerians have died, and are still dying on the operating tables in our hospitals. May Ellen Mofe-Damijo (MEE), a journalist and publisher of Classique magazine died during an ill-fated fibroid surgery on March 23, 1996. She was just 30. Chairman of Punch Newspapers Limited, Wale Aboderin, died during a heart procedure on May 30, 2018. Recently, the then Akwa Ibom State Police Commissioner, Waheed Ayilara, passed on, on the operating table during a prostate surgery on August 29, this year.
But for providence, former Ogun State Commissioner for Information, Yusuph Olaniyonu, a journalist, would have long died after he was severally operated on for prostate issues at the National Hospital, Abuja, and left in one of the rooms in the wards to die. He was later saved at a Cairo hospital in Egypt where he was rushed. How many of our compatriots have this kind of privilege?
Pathetic was the case of a 13-year-old boy, Akin Bright, whose lower intestine was missing between two hospitals – a private hospital and a public one – and who died on September 19, 2023.
As I write this, my heart bleeds profusely because one of my wife’s nieces, a complete orphan, is lying cold in a morgue in Imo State where two hospitals could not save her life and that of her new baby during and after childbirth. Losing the baby and the mother has been too devastating for us to bear. The list of tragic and near tragic cases in our hospitals is inexhaustible in the face of our helplessness and hopelessness.
As a way out and instead of embarking on unwarranted medical tourism as government officials do at the slightest opportunity, the federal and state governments should equip all their university teaching hospitals to be able to meet the challenges of the 21st century. The goal is to ensure that they catch up with rapidly advancing technology in health service delivery in the developed countries where their officials run to for medical tourism. Those days when members of the Saudi royal family were regular patients at our own University College Hospital (UCH), Ibadan, which is now a shadow of itself, regularly thrown into darkness for owing electricity bills like other teaching hospitals, should be brought back without delay.
There is also the need for the Medical and Dental Council of Nigeria (MDCN) and the universities to review the curricula of the medical schools, as some of the methods adopted to train the doctors are not in tune with the current trend.
Whenever a case of negligence is reported against any medical doctor or any health worker, MDCN and other regulatory bodies have a responsibility to investigate such case and, if found guilty, discipline the erring doctor or health professional. It is partly because of the inadequate unresponsiveness of MDCN and others that some relatives of dead patients take the law into their own hands and physically assault doctors and nurses, especially when they have reasons to suspect that negligence occasioned the death of their loved ones. Collectively, we must save our collapsed health sector to save our own lives.
•Omolale, a journalist, sent in this piece via somolale@gmail.com.
