The Chief Medical Director of University College Hospital (UCH), Ibadan, Professor Jesse Otegbayo, has said his vision for the foremost teaching hospital is to see it compete with the best tertiary hospitals around the world.
Speaking at a press conference to celebrate his second year anniversary in office on Monday, Otegbayo said UCH should be known as the leading tertiary hospital in Nigeria and Africa.
He said his ambition is to equip various departments of the hospital for efficient service delivery.
“My ambition for the next two years is to complete the Independent Power Project that we just lay the foundation today. There are many foundations that have been laid but are not build upon, so I will work seriously on our independent power generation.
“We want to equip our various department so that we can have state-of-the-art equipment and what people are going to look for in India or UK; we have men and women who can do even better than what they will see there, what we lack are the appropriate equipment and we are already working on it.
“The renovation work that is going on, we want to take it to all the nooks and crannies of the hospital and this is part of what I intend to do.These are what I have in mind to do in the next two years. You may call it ambition but to me it is one of the things we should be known for as the foremost tertiary institution in the country,” he said.
When asked about the most prevalent aliment in the hospital, the CMD said: “Being a developing country, infectious diseases come first. At a point in time, it was going down and non-transmissible disease like heart disease were becoming higher but with the COVID-19 pandemic, it is the number one problem we have. The second is cardiac issue; third is cancer and that is why we need to develop our services and we are working on that.”
Otegbayo dismissed the insinuations in some quarters that all the doctors and many health workers at the hospital contracted COVID-19, describing such reports as fake and untrue.
He said since the first index case was reported in the country on February 27, 2020, UCH has treated 947 COVID-19 patients, out of which 494 were staff members while the remaining 453 were non-staff. The CMD added that most of the infections were mild and no death was recorded.
“None of them had severe disease and we have not lost any member of staff. In fact, we have one of the least infected number of staff among all tertiary hospitals in Nigeria.
“Most of our staff live in the communities, so there is no way to judge that people contract COVID-19 in UCH.
“The lessons we have learnt from COVID-19 is that we have to be prepared for anything. It is a tiny organism that we can’t see, yet it is having a devastating effect on humans. We also learn to be ready because it is COVID-19 today, HIV some time ago, so it could be anything next. We should have trained personnel; equipped hospitals to train our people and we should continue to obey public health measure to prevent disease by having clean environment, clean water,” Otegbayo added.
The CMD who reeled out some of his achievements in the last two years, said the next two years would be concentrated on completing the ongoing projects in the hospital and ensuring that UCH takes its place as the best teaching hospital in Nigeria.
Those at the press conference include the wife of the CMD, Professor Bolanle Otegbayo; Chairman, Medical Advisory Committee,Dr Abiodun Adeoye; Director of Administration, Mr Stephen Oladejo; Director of Finance and Accounts, Mrs Oluyemis Matthew among others.
