Professor Wale Oke, the Chief Medical Director, Lagos State University Teaching Hospital (LASUTH), has blamed poor communication as the cause of the attitudinal complaints levelled against health workers in Nigeria.
Oke disclosed this during an in-house training for the medical staff of the institution with the theme “Attitudinal Change for Effective Service Delivery’’ at the teaching complex in Ikeja Lagos over the weekend.
Oke who said that the objective of the trainings was to improve on the operational efficiency of the staff, lamented that the gap between patient and staff communication has robbed the medical practices badly in the past and was an aspect that needed to be addressed in order to reposition the health sector.
“We need to improve on the services, most especially in the conduct and delivery of qualitative healthcare to our patients. We have had some complaints in the past from our patients in the service rendered by some staff; so we need to correct this imbalance; we need to discharge our duties as professionals on the job without leaving no room for lapses.
“About 90 per cent of attitudinal problems associated with medical staff are caused by communication gap,” he declared.
Speaking about the strike action embarked by resident doctors, Oke, said that the hospital had experienced high influx of patients as a result of resident doctors’ strike adding that it was an uphill task attending to all the patients.
“LASUTH was able to cope with the influx through the cooperation of the consultants who were ready to handle the emergencies. This is in line with our first mandate which is to save lives. The staff members need to know how to cope with stress and the influx. We need attitudinal change in the discharge of our duties and this will be a topic of discourse,’’ he said.
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