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The Chief Medical Director(CMD), University College Hospital(UCH), Ibadan, Prof. Abiodun Otegbayo, on Monday said the hospital’s new Intensive Care Unit(ICU) is the best amongst public health institutions in the country.
Otegbayo, who stated this at the commissioning of the renovated and re-equipped ICU center, said with the new facilities now in place, UCH is poised for a better care for the critically ill patients.
The CMD said the focus of his administration is to improve on the life of the hospital, adding that the country looks up to the teaching hospital to provide leadership in the health sector.
“Often times, there are cases of needless deaths; it saddens my heart when patients that should be given first class treatment could not get it because of lack of basic equipment that is taken for granted in hospitals of equal status outside the country.
“With these new facilities, we can be sure of near zero death cases henceforth,” Otegbayo said.
The CMD stated that his administration did a complete renovation and re-equipping of the right wing of the ICU which has not been used for about three years at a cost of about N127 million, which he said were “pooled together from our internally generated revenue.”
“We have the human resources; we are training and retraining them. At the same time, we are investing in developinhg our facilities to maximise the investment in human resources,” the CMD stated
Otegbayo added that UCH is ready to collaborate with Oyo State government and any other state government that is ready in various areas when such requests are made in order to ease the burden placed on the institution by the high number of patients that thronged the hospital daily.
Speaking on the project, Prof.Segun Ogunlade, said the ICU center was in disarray before the renovation.
He said the new ICU unit is meant for six critically ill patients, adding that all the equipments intalled are modern and one of the best that can be found around.
Similarly, the Director of Nursing Services, Dr. (Mrs) Patricia Onianwa , said before the renovation, the equipments at the ICU unit arw obsolete and usually malfunction.
“For sometime now, this place became dysfunctional because of the things that are not readily available for the management of critically ill patients.
“Now, management has resuscitated this place and its going to start working again. I will say it was not so bad but is better now,” she said.
The equipments commissioned includes seven mechanical turbo power ventilators; six multi-channel invasive monitors; one central monitor; four syringe pumps; four infusion pumps; six SAM-14 suction pumps; six electric beds; six air mattresses and two crash carts.