Date: 2017-01-06

Patients on road to full recovery have begun to flee hospitals in Ilorin, refusing to pay for the treatment enjoyed, medical authorities in the Kwara State capital have said.

Many of the patients flee due to their inability to pay for medical expenses incurred after being abandoned by their relatives, reports say.

Government owned hospitals have been the worst hit with such developments, and doctors claim the situation leaves them to bear the burdens.

University of Ilorin Teaching Hospital (UITH), the state's Specialist Hospital, Sobi and General Hospital, Ibrahim Taiwo Road, Ilorin are two of the medical centres plagued with patients' disappearances.

Patients would escape under the pretense of taking a stroll, before disappearing with intravenous material on them, medical personnel claim.

Mrs. Funmilayo Omojasola, the Principal Officer at Corporate Affairs Unit of the UITH, said the hospital would often "look inward" so as to provide a solution when such cases are received.

Police in the state has however been accused of dumping wounded persons at the hospitals, without providing adequate information on the persons.

The police, in its defence, said its duties rest at the level of taking victims to the hospital and trying to find out the location of their relatives "where possible."

"The issue of some of these patients absconding from the hospital wards has not come to us officially, but if the hospital management are saying we always dump bad cases of accident victims in their hospitals then where do they want us to drop such cases?" Kwara State Police Commissioner, Olusola Amore said.

"I think what we are doing is to save life. Are they expecting us to start paying for their expenses after bringing them to the hospitals? They should be fair to us."

Medical personnel say they had only been upholding the "Hippocratic Oath" of saving lives, as the situation was getting increasingly worrying.