Power Outages Frustrate Staff, Patients At Uni-Abuja Teaching Hospital

The lack of constant electricity supply has become a disincentive to some staff of the University of Abuja Teaching Hospital (UATH) Gwagwalada who have new equipment they can’t use due to epileptic power supply.

While some departments of the hospital have standby generators to supply electricity when power goes off, a few departments do not have such luxury and always find themselves idle when there’s no electricity.

Some units of the hospital are battling with how to cope with power outages so that it doesn’t affect services to patients.

The Physiotherapy unit of the hospital is most affected because it has no standby generator.

When THE WHISTLER visited the hospital, a medical worker at the unit who did not want his name mentioned, said they faced a lot of challenges with electricity because “most of our equipment is driven by light, and once there’s no light, it cripples a lot for the day.”

He said the department almost shut down recently due to serious power outages which crippled services.

He said, “The worst is that it happens during the day during clinic hours. There won’t be light, but you will see light in the evening and when we come to work in the morning, the light could be off for about 4 to 5 hours.

“So, this is affecting our services. Sometimes the patients will even make payments but we can’t do anything and have to keep re-booking them, but it doesn’t help.”

He said the hospital had introduced the e-folder and electronic transmission of information within the hospital which makes it crucial to have constant electricity supply, adding that it will be difficult to treat patients without power.

“The patients are not happy about it because some of them come from far places, like the neighbouring states, and they don’t find it easy at all,” he lamented.

Another staff in the Dental Unit of the hospital confirmed that the power outage was affecting their service.

He said although the unit has a standby generator, it became faulty over 6 months ago and it had not yet been fixed.

He said his unit had applied to the management for a smaller generator to power the unit because “patients come with acute pains and we need to use the machines to treat them, and if we don’t get light, they go back the same. We can’t rely on administering pain pills alone, it doesn’t help them.

“We cannot even chill ice blocks which we use for the acute cases. They need to combine it with physiotherapy treatments so that they can get complete healing.”

There are however departments that enjoy uninterrupted power supply such as the Radiology and the Trauma Centre.

Mr Ogbonna Fortune, a Radiographer in the hospital, said his unit enjoys constant light because it has a standby generator and an inverter.

He said there are some departments in the hospital that always have electricity such as the ICU, Emergency, Radiology and a few others due to the sensitive nature of their work.

“The scenario may not be the same for other departments, moreover, the equipment used in my unit are expensive and are sensitive to power fluctuations, so the hospital cannot afford power outages being the reason for the equipment getting faulty,” he said.

Suleiman Sani, public relations officer of the hospital, who spoke to THE WHISTLER on the telephone, said the management was doing its best to address all problems.

He said, “The management is making efforts to ensure that water storage is provided including making sure that adequate energy is supplied to the hospital and the surrounding communities. You know the situation of power supply in this country. Most companies supplying the power are not living up to the expectations. There are generating sets that are powered to supply to wards.”

Recall that this website reported on 5th June, 2022 that patients at the hospital complained of poor services and lack of water and power.