How my grandchild died due to medical neglect – Akpabio

Senate President Godswill Akpabio said he lost his grandchild in a government hospital due to medical neglect.

Akpabio who was speaking on the floor of the Senate on Friday during the ministerial screening of Tunji Alausa from Lagos State, said everyone had his own negative tale to tell about Nigeria’s education sector.

The senate president urged the Tinubu administration to be a corrective government, putting the right things in place in the health sector.

Alausa, a nephrologist, shared ways the nation’s healthcare system can be improved and fake drugs eliminated in pharmaceutical stores with members of the upper legislative house.

Narrating his ordeal, Akpabio said: “Every other person has been a victim of medical neglect.”

The senate president said his first grandchild passed away at a federal medical centre owing to a haemorrhage caused by medical neglect of a doctor.

“My first grandchild in 2019 in a federal medical centre died through bleeding. He was receiving drip and it was tissued in the night — there was no help.

“No doctor, no nurse. He bled until he lost 60 percent of his blood and almost going mental, he struggled and fell on the floor.

“He was looking for water to drink. He rolled on the floor outside and entered the early morning dew,” Akpabio said.

He said his grandchild was later found the next morning.

“By that time, he had gone into a coma.

“I was on my way to Port Harcourt for the 2019 rally when they called me,” he said.

Akpabio said when he got to the medical centre, he “struggled” with his physician to revive him but to no avail.

“I struggled. They went and brought a defibrillator to attempt to revive the heart, but it did not work,” he said.

The senate president said when he inquired when the defibrillator was last used, he was told the machine “stopped working eight years ago”.

“I used my hand and struggled with my personal physician, I could not revive him. I had to close his eyes and put him in the mortuary.

“Almost every family has suffered from what is going on in our hospitals. The doctor on duty that night had an emergency in his private clinic and he had to abandon the hospital to rush to go and attend to private patients in his private clinic,” he added.

Akpabio said Tinubu’s government must be “a corrective administration” to tackle the failures in the nation’s health sector.

“Health is wealth. There is no way a country can be wealthy when its people are not healthy,” he said.