By Kenechukwu Ofomah
With the world class Trauma Centre being built by the Anambra State Government at the Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu University Teaching Hospital, Amaku-Awka, and the state-of-the-art equipment being installed, the hospital is set to become a centre of excellence for the handling of trauma patients in the entire Southeast region.
The Chief Medical Director of the hospital, Dr Maureen Umeakuewulu made the disclosure during an interaction with journalists at the Board Room of the hospital on Tuesday.
The media chat was part of the new CMD’s several engagements with critical stakeholders, marking the official take-off of her administration.
According to the COOUTH CMD, the vision of the state governor, Professor Chukwuma Soludo, to build the trauma centre was a wonderful initiative, and deserves commendation as it is a critical aspect of health service that the state had lacked in.
She noted that when completed in the coming months, the COOU will be a centre for comprehensive care for trauma patients in the entire south east, with all the key components.
“I am sure that in the next few months, the COOUTH trauma centre will become functional. We trust the commitment of the state governor towards the health sector and we believe he will continue to invest the right resources that will engender a turnaround in this hospital,” she said.
Umeakuewulu, who is a consultant gynaecologist, expressed gratitude to Governor Soludo for appointing her to head the institution, expressed happiness to be back to serve her own people.
She explained that the media engagement, just like every other stakeholder engagement meeting she had held, was to understand the situation on ground and build the necessary collaboration that will spur the transformation of the hospital.
The CMD, who also shared very lofty vision for the turnaround of the fortunes of the Teaching Hospital, revealed that she has an agenda to make the hospital a centre of excellence in various medical fields.
“Since I resumed office a week ago, I have been meeting with heads of units and departments, as well as other stakeholders, to get the first need assessment of the hospital. With these meetings, it is becoming clearer, the situation and what we must begin to do as a leadership.
“For me, we must focus strongly on these three things- improving our service delivery in the hospital, training and retraining of our medical personnel, and strengthening our research activities.
“On service delivery, we want to computerize the hospital system and do away with issues of manual payments and folders which is the case presently. This, will in turn help, us plug leakages, reduce corruption and unnecessary wasting of patients’ time. We are committed to supporting the hospital personnel to effectively deploy technology to ease processes and shore up our revenue. Overall, we want to achieve a maximally functional system, where even the smallest leaks would be identified and plugged.
“It is our target to activate some units in the hospital that are not functioning maximally, so that in the near future, people from Anambra and even outside Anambra, would be able to seek medical care in this facility.
“It is regrettable that there is no cancer centre in Anambra State, and our patients have to go to other states to seek medical help. We are looking at opening a cancer centre in the state. It’s quite expensive but we believe that the governor, who is committed to supporting the health sector, will support its actualization.
“We also want to establish very active and viable orthopaedic and radiology units and get enough professionals to man them.
“In the coming years, we will devote serious effort to securing accreditation for residency training in all the departments in the hospital, keying in from where my predecessors stopped,” she said.
On training and retraining of personnel, Dr Umeakuewulu said the teaching hospital will partner with other hospitals internationally and locally, in expertise exchange so as to improve the capacity of its workforce.
She also said they will be strengthening the telemedicine aspects to be able to reach out to the numerous patients that will be needing their services but may not be able to come here due to distance.
The CMD vowed to explore grants opportunities, as well as local and international collaborations to boost medical research in the hospital, as government alone cannot fund research activities.
She emphasized the need for high network Anambra people to collaborate with the hospital towards improving its services to the people.
She said, “We have a very strong base of wealthy Anambra people sparse all over the world, who are well-blessed, and we will be reaching out to them for endowments in terms of equipment, structures, hospital bill payments etc. We want to establish an endowment fund where friends of the hospital and philanthropists can donate towards improving access to healthcare in the hospital.
“This is own and we owe a duty to make it work.”
The new CMD also revealed plans by his administration to open up and strengthen the institution’s satellite hospitals so that their doctors in family medicine, community medicine and other areas of expertise can move down deeper and offer services to the people at the grassroots.
She also promised to work towards developing a strong referral system whereby the satellite hospitals and other health centers can refer their patients from the communities to the facility and they will be well-taken care of. The rate of maternal mortality in Nigeria is alarming. We need to do a lot to contain the 80% of our women who die during childbirth outside the hospital, especially at the local communities,” she promised.
