The Chief Medical Director of Alex Ekwueme Federal Teaching Hospital Abakaliki (AE-FUTHA), Robinson Chukwudi Onoh, has reiterated the hospital’s preparedness to tackle the scourge of Lassa fever and other viral diseases in the South East region and the country at large.
Onoh disclosed this while listing the challenges facing the hospital, including outrageous billing by the Enugu Electricity Distribution Company (EEDC) and the lack of basic modern equipment.
However, he decried the loss of fifteen medical health workers to Lassa fever in the state.
Onoh, who recently marked his one year in office, applauded President Bola Ahmed Tinubu for appointing him as the Chief Medical Director of the hospital. He added that the hospital has come of age and can now deliver full-scale electronic medical records.
According to him:
“The challenges are many, but the major one is power. Power has been so epileptic, and the bills from EEDC are quite high. Imagine this hospital being asked to pay over N40 million in a month. That makes it difficult for us to sustain other sections of the hospital after paying for power.
“So power is a very major challenge that we have here. Other challenges include providing diesel and maintaining generators. When the EEDC national grid is down, we need diesel to run the system.
“When these generators break down, we also need to repair them at the same time. So power remains a significant challenge for us. Additionally, we lack basic modern equipment,” he said.
Onoh also enumerated his administration’s achievements within one year in office, stating:
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“We have implemented initiatives aligned with the Minister of Health and Social Welfare’s vision, as well as Mr. President’s. This hospital has now fully transitioned to electronic medical records, meaning we are going paperless. We have also introduced several innovative programs.
“We have established an IVF center, and in our first batch, we achieved a 70% success rate. This is one of our key achievements because we have been able to give hope to the hopeless. People who had sought conception solutions far and wide came to this hospital, paid very little, and many of them now have triplets or single-term pregnancies in gestation.
“We have also transformed this hospital into a hub for medical tourism, attracting patients from Cameroon and across Nigeria. We have improved our clinical services, and our dialysis center is now one of the best in the country.
“Our neurosurgeons perform outstanding surgeries. So far, we have conducted about 19 hip replacements and 23 knee replacements in this hospital. Additionally, we have turned our emergency medicine department into an accredited training center for emergency doctors.
“Within my first year in office, we met with the Coordinating Minister of Health and Social Welfare, alongside a team from the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, to discuss advancing emergency medicine in Nigeria,” he stressed.
He further commended the Governor of Ebonyi State and his wife, Francis Nwifuru, the Minister of Works, David Umahi, Senator Onyekachi Nwebonyi, House of Representatives members Idu Igariway and Chinedu Ogah, and other prominent leaders of the state for their contributions toward the hospital’s ongoing development.
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