‘Shortage of staff in critical areas affects effective healthcare delivery in BSUTH’

Chief Medical Director, CMD of the Benue State University Teaching Hospital, BSUTH, Professor Orkughga Malu has stated that one of the major challenge still standing in the way of the institution for effective healthcare delivery services was shortage of staff in some of the critical areas.

Professor Malu who made the lamentation in an interview with The Guardian in his office at the weekend, regretted that situation had at several intervals posed a delay in attending to patients that desire urgent attention and appealed to the Benue State Government to act fast to salvage the situation.

He maintained that though the lack of personnel cut across all sections in the hospital like cleaners, porters, nurses, the more worrisome challenge in some specialised areas of hospital.

“Our major challenge in the teaching hospital is that of personnel. We do not have specialists in some critical areas and for this reason we used to employ the services of those from outside but they are not always available to attend to patients since they only visit,” Malu noted.

Consequent to this, the CMD said that they had embarked on sponsorship of its staff for further training to fill the vacuum, even as he appealed to the state government for a better budgetary provision next year to enable the institution send some of the staff abroad to acquire more advance training.

“Another serious challenge we are facing in the hospital is that of water. We have three boreholes in the hospital but the water is contaminated and not good for consumption. So, water is pumped from the state water board in the hospital sometimes once or twice a week and this seriously affect our services.”

The Chief Medical Director also said that the hospital needed to have its oxygen plant rather than running to Abuja to buy in cylinders, noting that having the plant will assist them to take prompt care of patients that needed intensive care.

Another section the CMD said deserve urgent concern in the hospital was in the cardiology department, which he said the hospital had only one cardiologist and the only one in the entire state even when it was supposed to have four.

Fielding questions on how the hospital had handled its initial challenge of clinical waste disposal, Malu said that the institution’s insulator that was not working properly at the beginning had been rectify and was working well; even as he encouraged other hospitals in Makurdi to come and access the services.