How A Child Barely Escaped Death At Enugu Hospital After Power Supply Interruption

As a result of power supply break at the Enugu State University Teaching Hospital, a child on oxygen supply barely escaped death.Speaking with Premium Times a witness said that the incident had occurred Sunday, September 21. The sudden blackout left the boy gasp for breath

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Michael Eze, an American-based academic, who took a relative’s son to the hospital at the time, expressed his shock over the fact that there was no back-up generator in the hospital.

 “This is the disaster called Enugu state teaching hospital. There are children in the children emergency ward. Light just went off and there was no back up electricity. Worse still – one of the kids was on oxygen supply when the light went off. But this is not new, the children emergency ward has not had back up electricity for weeks.” 

Eze later said how sad it was to observe how the staff “struggled frantically” to save the patient’s life by manually pumping oxygen.

“I could see the child dying before our very eyes because oxygen supply to him was suddenly interrupted. Initially, the doctors and nurses were unmoved. They didn’t make any effort. They were just bidding their time. I couldn’t bear it and I raised an alarm and threatened to go to the press if anything happened to the patient.”

The academic disclosed that only after then they started the action and were doing the manual pumping until the supply was restored 6 hours later.

The medics of the hospital were said to have told Eze that the situation with interruptions with not new to them adding that they had a power inverter which did not function well.

“When I initially started complaining, there were telling me ‘it appears you don’t live in this country. It’s nothing new. There are times there won’t be electricity supply for weeks’. They were just telling me cock and bull story.” 

Eze was surprised to know that while there was no power supply in the children emergency ward, there was electricity in the residential quarters of the hospital.

“This is really really sad and I weep for this country.”

The hospital authorities could not be reached for the comments, as the time of filing this report.