UCH not a death trap –CMD

June 16, 2014

 

 

Chief Medical Director, UCH, Prof. Temitope Alonge

Chief Medical Director of the University College Hospital, Ibadan, Prof. Temitope Alonge, has said that the teaching hospital recorded low mortality rate over a period of one year, debunking the opinion that most people referred to the hospital do not always survive.

While presenting the hospital’s mortality statistics from August 2012 to July 2013, at a seminar on the Prevention of Venous Thrombo Embolism in Ibadan, Alonge said that most of the deaths recorded occurred because the majority of the referral cases were too serious to redeem.

“We have a clinic in the hospital that takes care of those with HIV/AIDS patients. They contribute to deaths from infection. People’s thinking that once your case has been referred to UCH, you are ultimately going to meet your creator is not correct because we can comfortably tell the whole world that we have a mortality rate of 15 per cent over a period of one year.

“Considering the fact that a lot of patients who are referred to UCH, are patients who hitherto had either been written off from the Primary Health Care or Secondary Health Care centres or who have delayed in coming for a lot of other reasons, we have a mortality rate of 15 per cent over a period of one year,” Alonge said.

While defending the release of the statistics to the public, Alonge said it was not intended to blow the hospital’s trumpet but to point out the common causes of death in UCH.

“Here, every death is important. We are not being vindictive or playing God. But the lessons we learn from a death is going to become a standard of care for the next patient who has similar symptoms. This is why we had a record of our mortality data for the year,” he said.

Alonge added that the hospital’s resuscitated open heart surgery and cardiac intervention programme had successfully carried out 17 open heart surgeries and 17 intervention cardiology to stop deaths arising from heart attack and congenital heart problems.