A man, Mr. Abdufattah Rufai, has alleged that negligence by doctors at a private hospital, Bamise Hospital, Agege, Lagos, and their colleagues at the Lagos University Teaching Hospital, Idi Araba, resulted in the recent death of his wife, Aisha Rufai, during childbirth.
Rufai told our correspondent that his deceased wife was billed to deliver her child at Bamise Hospital on January 5, 2018, but the doctors felt that she could not do that through the natural channel and resorted to performing a Caesarean section on her because during her prolonged labour, she had become very weak.
Also, by the next day when the operation had been completed, the baby was brought out in a very weak stage and was even unconscious.
Upon getting to LUTH, we were confronted with another negligence. Immediate theatre surgery should have been done on her, but doctors on duty at the emergency and accident section were just behaving lackadaisically until after 24hours when I was told to take my wife for renal dialysis
In order to save the dying infant, the doctors applied some medical measures to resuscitate the baby.
But in the process, the equally weak and dying mother was allegedly abandoned by the doctors at the hospital.
Rufai added that while efforts were being made to resuscitate the baby, the mother was already bleeding and then the doctors and nurses moved to her side, and at a point, they succeeded in stopping the bleeding and closed her up.
But Rufai further said, “Shortly after that, the bleeding returned and the doctors, instead of referring her to a better government hospital, took her in again into the theatre for another surgery. After that, the bleeding stopped and she was still unconscious. So, she was referred to LUTH on January 7, 2018. Though not too strong to be transported, we insisted, and in order not to lose her, we went to LUTH.
“Upon getting to LUTH, we were confronted with another negligence. Immediate theatre surgery should have been done on her, but doctors on duty at the emergency and accident section were just behaving lackadaisically until after 24hours when I was told to take my wife for renal dialysis.
“When we went for dialysis on January 8, we were told at the centre that her problem was not renal failure, but heart failure and she was moved back to the hospital ward. Not quite 10 minutes, her heart stopped and CPR was conducted, not even by the on-call doctors, but by another doctor, who is our relative working in LUTH. But eventually, my wife died.”
The distraught husband, therefore, insisted that the alleged negligence, which attended the handling of his wife by the doctors at both the private and government hospitals, resulted in her death.
“It is clear that the negligence, which started from Bamise Hospital down to LUTH, was responsible for her death because if LUTH had attended well to her, she might have survived. I know her time had come, nothing could be done but not under a circumstance of doctors’ negligence,” he said.
When our correspondent contacted the consultant, who performed the Caesarean section on Rufai’s wife at Bamise Hospital, Agege, Dr. Yemi Alabi, for his reaction to the deceased woman’s allegations, he promised to get back to us within 24 hours. But as at the time of going to press, he had yet to do so.
The Public Relations Officer, LUTH, Mr. Kelechi Otuneme, said what happened in the case of the late Mrs. Rufai should not be misconstrued as medical negligence.
Otuneme noted that the hospital had always been confronted with the problem of late presentation of patients, which people had always wrongly blamed on the hospital as medical negligence.
He said, “Medical negligence is far different from not attending to a patient as the patient expects; that is not the definition of negligence and there are situations.
“People will nurse a sickness for long and would not go and see a specialist. But when the case gets out of hand, they quickly rush down to the teaching hospital, and later turn round to give LUTH a bad name. If you classify patients, some will die in the next one minute, some will die in the next two days. The person that needs attention most will be attended to first and the other persons may feel neglected.
“The issue of emergencies in LUTH are attended to in the order of utmost importance or timeframe. So, in the course of attending to patients, who may likely pass on within a split second and stabilise him, another one may be brought in immediately and also needs to be resuscitated on the spot. The other patient that still has a bit better condition will feel that doctors and nurses have neglected him or her.
“Even when we have bed space issues, we respond swiftly to the patients who are in a critically bad conditions so that they can be resuscitated immediately.”
