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PEOPLES DAILY, TUESDAY, JULY 17, 2012
Primus Hospital saga: Between safety of life and politics of mudslinging (II)
A theatre room at Primus Hospital in Karu, ,Abuja By Josephine Ella
A
fter an alleged failed attempt to extort N500 million from the Primus hospital management, the woman at the centre of the storm, which appears to be threathening the existence of the hospital whose name was simply given as Grace, resorted to threat of legal action. Subsequently, the media allegedly became a potent tool for her to achieve her aim. It did not take so long for mediums to begin to pick up her tale of how surgeons in the hospital allegedly cut her open and stitched back the cut without removing the fibroid inside her. Grace’s tale had of late formed the basis of many media reports accusing these Indian doctors of being incompetence. When despite these, the hospital failed to meet the purported demand, the battle line was drawn as she went ahead with her lawyer to make a case before a law court in Abuja, a development which the
hospital management said it was prepared to fight to a logical end. However, in an ironical twist, investigation has revealed that Grace has withdrawn the case against she instituted against the hospital upon realising that she was ill advised. What actually went wrong? What informed Grace’s decision to withdraw the case? To this, the Chairperson of the hospital, Achla Dewan confirmed on enquiry that the lady in question had actualled signed in for fibroid operation which the hospital performed. According to her, the surgeons removed all the small growths, except an extremely large one that due to the risk involved, the experts gave her drugs to take to shrink the growth which if removed could result to serious bleeding and possible death. Rather than taking the drugs given to her and returning to the hospital within the three weeks time frame given her, Grace was said to have proceeded to an indigenous hospital and next, to
some media houses to make scathing allegations against the hospital. “They wrote a letter to us demanding for N500 million which we did not comply to. They now wrote to the Nigeria Medical and Dental Association but before they could take action, she ran to the court. But as I’m talking to you now, she has withdrawn the case because she was advised that she cannot win the case. On our part, we have evidences to tender before the court to justify that we carried out the operation on her. For instance, the cuts are still with us, so the court could carry out a DNA test to ascertain this,” she confirmed. She debunked media reports of a purported N25,000-N30, 000 being charged by the hospital as registration fee, saying the rumour was ”outrageous, wrong and baseless”. Rather, she explained that the hospital charges N8,000 consultancy fees for senior consultants and N4,000 for junior consultants in the case of minor cases, while N1000 is charged for registration.
Reacting to a recent report on a national daily(not Peoples Daily) titled, ‘Karu Specialist Hospital: Built at N3.8bn, sold to Indians at N600m’, the chairperson explained that FCT administration did not sell the hospital to them, rather only 40 per cent of the hospital was leased to them by the administration in a 15 years contract. She tendered receipt of a N40 million payment to the FCT administration, dated May 5, 2012, being the annual lease fee for this year, to debunk a report on another media that the hospital has never paid the lease fee since its began operation. Dewan was unhappy that Nigerians whom they have sacrifice so much to serve, are unappreciative and in a bid to frustrate them out of business, have resorted to media war against them. She alleged that some Nigerian doctors, who gets huge commissions from hospitals abroad for referring patients seeking for medical attention,
must be playing this pull them down politics against the hospital. “I have strong feeling that some doctors in this country who benefit from hospitals abroad for referring patients to them are behind all this damaging media reports that are being sponsored against us,” Dewan said. But she said the hospital would no longer condone such publicaions as she hinted that the hospital management was set to file a legal suit against one of the newspapers. In the same vein, medical superintendent of the hospital, Dr. Eugene Emodi blamed the negative reports flying around against the hospital to the wicked antics of some selfish Nigerians. Reacting to this, the superintendent, a Nigerian of over 30 years experience in medicine, describe the situation as a “Macabre dance of death, where our own Nigerians are playing that Russian runlet with the lives of our people, patients and Staff”. “I find myself in a situation Continued on page 18