A ward at the General Hospital Ochochi, Yala (photo: Tony Etim)
Residents of Yala Community have shunned the General Hospital Ochochi in Yala Local Government Area, Cross River State for reasons ranging from no doctors, poor infrastructure, poverty, and location of the facility.
The Southern Examiner investigation reveals that since the Medical Superintendent of the hospital, Dr. Gabriel Egbai retired on April 23, 2024, no doctor has been posted to the facility. He was the only doctor at the facility for the past four years.
Doctor Egbai had served as the Medical Superintendent of the hospital from January 2020 to April 2024. Our Correspondent gathered that currently the facility is being manned by eight nurses and six casual staff, and a few administrative personnel.
But Cross River State Health Commissioner, Dr. Henry Egbe Ayil, told our reporter “We have deployed a doctor from General Hospital Ogoja to Okpoma. He should report there within the week.”
But as at Wednesday, May 22, the doctor was yet to resume at the hospital; and the General Hospital Ogoja, like every government- owned hospital in the state except General Hospital, Mary Slessor Avenue has only one doctor while General Hospital, Calabar boasts of two.
Patients from the area prefer to patronize the General Hospital Ogoja and a Catholic Hospital at Monaiya, Ogoja while affluent members of the community patronize private hospitals and clinics within and outside Ogoja.
A few locals, who patronize the Ochochi hospital are poor farmers and they mostly come when they are at the point of death, and most of them don’t survive. Sources from General Hospital Ochochi told The Southern Examiner that no patient has come to the hospital since March 2024.
According to these sources, the only patients who visit the hospital regularly are People Living With HIV/Aids who come for their drugs and consultation with staff of a Non-Government Agency, ECEWS, that has her office within the hospital premises.
Sources from the hospital also disclosed that one of the reasons the indigenes shun the hospital is because the locals insist that the facility should have been sited at Okpoma, headquarters of Yala Local Government Area; or Okuku, where a campus of the University of Cross River State, UNICROSS, is located and not at Okochi.
Facilities at the hospital are in a sorry state of disrepair as most of the mattresses in the two wards have no coverings, bedsheets or pillows. The hospital is not connected to the national grid as there is a public power supply in Yala while the diesel generator has not been put on since June 2023 and a smaller petrol generating set is used mostly to power the pumping machine that supplies water to the facility and the staff quarters.
The hospital depends on solar energy installed by ECEWS to power her office and this is supposed to be put off at close of work by staff of the NGO. Since government hospitals in the state do not get impress from government they take 30 percent of what they generate in lieu of impress and in the case of the Ochochi facility, where the internally generated revenue is zero, there is no money to run the facility or update equipment.
The hospital depends on vendors who give them drugs for the pharmacy and reagents for laboratories where there are patients; and these vendors are paid from bills paid by the patients.
