JOE EFFIONG, UYO
President Muhammadu Buhari has reappointed Prof. Emem Abasi Bassey as the Chief Medical Director of the University of Uyo Teaching Hospital, UUTH, Akwa Ibom State  for second and last term in office.
Prof. Bassey who disclosed this to journalists in Uyo, on Thursday during a press briefing shortly after taking them on a facility tour on the hospital premises.
expressed his appreciation  to President Buhari for finding him worthy for reappointment, even as he enumerated his achievements in the last four years to include, improvement on clinical services, infrastructural development, facelift of the premises and refurbishment of all departments.
According to him, “almost all the buildings we met on  ground are at various stages of completion and some already completed.The GOPD, completed and furnished. We have completed the radio diagnostics (CT Scan) building. The laboratory block which we met at the earthing level, has been completed. The molecular laboratory building completed.
“We embarked on a water expansion project from 40,000 litres to 180,000 litres daily. Our 16 bedded  Intensive Care Unit completed both neonatal and paediatric, with a dedicated generators and solar, courtesy of Covid 19 intervention fund. We refurbished the dialysis unit and bought four new machines
“We want to make the hospital more patient friendly. We have introduced in phases, a new electronic software, EMR, to transform the UUTH (which is a public hospital)  into a paperless hospital in two years. We will introduce a world class  corporate clinic for VIPs, where the rich people who want to be specially attended to by the doctors can have such service  but that comes with a cost.”
However, the CMD lamented that despite all the achievements so far, power supply has been the greatest challenge in the hospital urging relevant authorities, the state government, NDDC and other corporate bodies to come to their assistance to ensure a seamless service delivery.
He noted that on assumption of office in 2018, he made efforts to connect the hospital to national grid after paying millions of Naira just to acquire armored cables saying that they still experience erratic power supply making them fall back on generators which according to him is very expensive.
“Power is a major challenge we face, I have tried to talk about power. Unfortunately, public power has been very poor and we have been running the hospital totally on generators. This is very expensive.  We use about 1,500 litres of diesel in a month, and diesel now cost about N850, N900 per litre. Then, multiply 1500litres of diesel by 850 or N900 every month,  that gives you an idea of how many millions we expend every month.
“Over 40 percent of revenue of this hospital is expended on power alone and that’s a huge cause of challenges we have here in terms of services. This is a cry for help, we need help, we are not asking for money, we are only asking for what ever intervention agencies that are there such as  the NDDC, the Akwa Ibom state government can do let them go ahead, we are serving Akwa Ibom people, 95% of our patients are mainly Akwa Ibom people.”
The CMD also decried the high level of  vandalism and theft in the facility despite the security personnel in the premises and urged the security to up their ante on their duty.
Bassey hinted that they have concluded plans to Inaugurate hospital endowment fund for social services explaining further, “like in our dialysis centre we were forced to bring down the cost of dialysis as part of our social services. You need about N35, 000 for a session and when we realized that it was a very major cost to our patients we had to reduce it to N25,000 because some people have to do it twice or thrice in a week.
“In that unit, we buy consumables of over Two Million Naira  and at the end of the month that unit will only generate a little above One Million Naira,  you see we are running at a lost. We have lost millions of Naira through waivers but we see it as part of our social services and the hospital endowment fund will help us sustain it.
In his remarks, the Chairman, Nigeria Union of Journalists, Amos Etuk congratulated the new leadership of UUTH and wish they fruitful new tenure.
Etuk however urged the interventionist agency, NDDC to come in and complete a building block abandoned years ago even as he urged other corporate bodies to partner the UUTH to ensure better service delivery to Akwa Ibom people.