By Ishaya Ibrahim, News Editor
A viral video trending on the social media has shown that the Lagos University Teaching Hospital (LUTH), one of Nigeria’s foremost tertiary health care centres, has no accommodation for nursing mothers whose babies have medical issues.
The video was posted by a lady whose voice could be heard urging Nigerians to share the video in order for it to get to the highest authorities in the country.
In the video, a number of women were seen on passageway with their sleeping mats, some of them holding their babies. The lady who shot the video claimed that after she had spent about a million naira, LUTH management threw them out.
The video has generated a lot of reactions from Nigerians.
@RealSolaKuti tweeted: “I woke up this morning and saw this video and I just wanted to cry….this is LUTH. A federal hospital in Lagos where humans are treated like wild animals. New mothers forced to sleep on the floor in the open.”
@Initheking also tweeted: “As a very young child I sometimes followed my dad to his Saturday shift at LUTH. He worked at the production unit of the pharmacy department. The hospital was standard, quite a number of drugs were produced and the machines were all working. Today, the story is different. Shame.”
@K_omowamiwa said: “LUTH is being overburdened by cases that should ordinarily be dealt with by primary and secondary care facilities. That being said, LUTH is in need of increased capacity. Poor funding and mismanagement of even those limited funds have led us here.”
According to today.ng, the chief medical director of LUTH, Professor Chris Bode, said the eviction of the nursing mothers was for their own good, to protect them from COVID-19.
“There is a hospice in LUTH where people who do not have a place to stay can stay. We are in the process of preparing a place for our COVID-19 patients who will move into the place and we cannot allow people who do not have COVID- 19 to be exposed to that. This was explained to them you can call the CMAC to ask him.
“This place call a hospice is within LUTH with beds and a toilet facility is there and that place is made for people who cannot go home. She cannot say we are not taking care of their babies. We don’t want them to catch COVID-19.
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