Date: 2018-09-30

The anguish of patients of public hospitals across the country has worsened as a result of the ongoing strike embarked upon by the organised labour.

When one of The Punch correspondents visited the University of Ilorin Teaching Hospital and some Kwara-owned hospitals, it was observed that many families had withdrawn their family members to private hospitals for a better health care.

Non-clinical staff of the hospital complied with the strike, leaving some doctors and senior workers dressed in mufti attending to the few remaining patients.

It was also observed that the hospitals ran skeletal services, while they had discharged patients whose cases were believed to have stabilised.

The new Director General, Kwara State Hospital Management Board, Mr Oladimeji Sa'ad-Aluko, on Saturday, confirmed to one of our correspondents that all the public hospitals under the Kwara State Government ran skeletal services since the strike commenced.

He said, "We want to make sure that at least patients are not endangered, so we had to discharge all the cases that were stabilised. We are not taking major cases. We only handled major cases that required emergencies."

The Kwara State Government had stated that the strike had negatively affected the nation.

The state Commissioner for Sports and Youth Development, who represented the state government during a special Jumat prayer to mark Nigeria's 58th independence anniversary on Friday, urged President Muhammadu Buhari to resolve the impasse with the workers.

A visit to the headquarters of the Kogi State Ministry of Health on Friday also showed that the gate was locked.

At the State Specialist hospital on IBB way, Lokoja, the compound was deserted.

Similarly, no staff was sighted at the Federal Medical Centre, Lokoja.

However, some patients were still on their beds, while others were outside their ward due to the heat resulting from outage since the strike commenced on Thursday.

One of the patients who spoke with one of our correspondents on condition of anonymity expressed the hope that government would address the demands of workers so that they could return to work.

She added, "No one is considering moving out for now as we heard that only the nurses were on strike and that the doctors were not affected."

But when asked if she had been attended to since Friday, the patient said no.

"No one has attended to us since Friday," she answered.

The admin block was completely deserted with no staff in sight.

The Kogi chapter of the Nigeria Medical Association said it was in total support of the warning strike, adding that members had been ordered to join until otherwise instructed The action, however, affected banking activities.

Customers at the France Road branch of Diamond Bank were not allowed to enter into the banking hall but could only make use of the Automatic Teller Machines for cash transactions.

Also, activities at government ministries and parastatals, like the Federal Secretariat in Kano, were paralysed, as their offices remained under lock and key, following the NLC's directive.

Prior to the commencement of the strike, the Chairman of the Kano chapter of the NLC, Ado Minjibi, promised that as long as the Minister of Labour and Productivity, Chris Ngige, failed to reach an agreement with Labour over the implementation of workers minimum wage, workers in the state should continue the strike as directed by the NLC national secretariat in Abuja.