•Facility gets 40 patients daily
More patients are checking into the Federal Neuro-Physchiatric Hospital, Yaba, Lagos Mainland. The facility attends to between 35 and 40 patients daily, according to the Medical Director, Mr Rahman Lawal.
He said: “The number of patients we receive on any day at the Emergency Unit has increased. We now see 35 to 40 new patients, per day. It is like a busy market each day, here in the hospital premises. That is why we had to relocate our Emergency Unit to another part of the hospital. This has helped us to get more consulting rooms, bigger and more comfortable waiting areas and rooms for the patients. That initiative has considerably reduced the waiting time of the patients. At the moment, the hospital has a total of 576 bed spaces. There are 127 at Oshodi annex. There are 449 here at Yaba. The difference between Yaba and Oshodi is that the Administrative Block is situated here. So administration flows from here and cascades into different departments and units at Oshodi.”
On the high patients in-flux, he said: “The reason why there is increase in patients’ attendance in our hospital is one; this is the only psychiatric hospital in Lagos. Luckily for the state, there are psychiatric facilities in the two teaching hospitals and the several general hospitals. So they have reduced the patients’ population load on us. But the fact remains that, this hospital remains the one with admission facilities for patients that need care in mental health. In addition, we are in a developing country, where malaria can be an accelerated factor that can cause psychiatric disorder. Infectious conditions can lead to psychiatric disorders. All these – malaria, pneumonia, tuberculosis (TB) and other airborne diseases – are highly prevalent in developing countries like ours. This is taken for granted in developed world where they had fewer or no case of malaria, for instance.
“Two, compared with 10 years ago, the population of the country has increased, side by side, increase in the population of any country. That translates to the fact that psychiatric population of such communities would have increased in number. The percentage may not increase, but the population would make the number to increase. So we may be talking of 12 percent for example, but when you look at 12 percent of our population 10 years ago and now, you will realise that the number has increased. And we should not forget the socio-economic reasons, too. The saving grace is that we now have the facilities to meet up with the rising number, unlike in the 70s, when it used to be just Yaba or Lagos University Teaching Hospital (LUTH). There are more facilities, more doctors and more high- tech equipment available.”
Lawal has been coping with the increasing hospital attendance because, according to him, he has been working in the hospital for years. “I did my residency training and consultancy here. So, I am familiar with the problems facing the hospital. That made it easy for me when I became the MD to identify the challenges and attempt to proffer solutions.”
Lawal added: “Some of the challenges had to do with the physical structures, because our hospital is ageing, it is 107 years old. We had challenges with parking space for both staff and visitors to our hospital and need for more consulting rooms. We worked round those daunting challenges. But the greatest challenge was the human management. I discovered that the staff easily misunderstood, misinterpreted moves by the management, even if the step will benefit them and move the system forward.”
Describing mental health as the bedrock of holistic health, he said:“If you are physically well but not mentally well, one is not holistically well. Mental health is taken for granted here in the country, unlike in foreign lands. It is when you have good mental health that you can boast of good health. Mental health is the bedrock of good health. If you are physically well but mentally unstable, you are not well. Mental health is important; it goes hand in hand with physical health.”
Mental illness, he said, is perceived by what people experience, noting: “We can say there is major mental ill health, where sufferer has problem with perception and claims to see, hear or feel what is not real. This means that, such see, hear, sense or feel what the rest of us cannot see, hear, sense or feel; some may even smell what others like us cannot smell.”
On how the hospital is coping with the demand for specialists/professional care, Dr Lawal said: “In the olden days, when people had psychiatric problems and they were not violent and they went to see doctors and all diagnoses were exhausted, medics would then say, ‘why don’t you go and see Lambo. That was then. Now, there is improved diagnosis. And this hospital has stepped up in this area by introducing ‘Biological psychiatry’. Whatever we diagnosed here, such as depression, will be diagnosed elsewhere as depression. Just as it is with disease, anywhere malaria, Ebola or cancer is diagnosed, take the result to anywhere; it will come back the same. Our challenge then in diagnoses was that we did not always have the causative factor, but now, we have improved and further mastered our profession,” he assured.
He said Biological psychiatry was a pioneering collaborative research work between the Federal Neuropsychiatric Hospital, Yaba, and the University of Maryland School of Medicine, Baltimore, United States of America.
Dr Lawal shed more light: “Before now, many people for instance associate the moon with mental illness. And they say once there are lunar changes, i.e, the phases of the moon affect the mental being of a person. Indeed, that is an erroneus belief. The lunar phases have nothing to do, when the illness manifests in some people. That is where the word ‘lunatic’ or ‘lunacy’ originates from, but this is not true. It is simply a myth. There is no relationship between the moon and mental illness. That is where the Biological psychiatry comes in, it is designed to improve on the diagnosis and treatment of psychiatric disorders in the country, the initiative is first of its kind in West and Central Africa. Statistics show that Nigeria has less than one psychiatrist per million of the population and only one in 10 persons who requires psychiatric care and treatment, eventually obtains it.”
“The essence of the Biological psychiatry”, according to Dr Lawal, is to: “Couple practices with research to improve quality of service to patients. The end point is that we have entered into a new age of psychiatry in Nigeria and we are proud of this achievement.”
