The management of the University of Benin Teaching Hospital (UBTH) on Wednesday said it waived about N84 million in medical bills for patients that visited the hospital in 2021.
Briefing journalists ahead of the tertiary hospital’s 50th anniversary slated for May 12, 2022, Darlington Obaseki, the chief medical director of UBTH, who lamented the increasing lack of affordable healthcare, said the hospital is providing services that are highly subsidised.
“Our people cannot pay for medical care. In 2021, we gave medical care to the tune of N84 million which was waived. It is more than that presently. I am sure, this year, we have waived about N100m. The sustainability of our services is impairing because people are not able to afford them. The majority of patients in Benin access services here and our staff are overburdened yet people are not paying,” Obaseki lamented.
He, therefore, harped on the need to integrate and make people, especially indigent patients, as an integral part of the health insurance scheme so that hospitals like UBTH will not fold up.
According to him, “Most complaints about UBTH is not about the quality of services they get, it is about the cost of treatment. So, the problem we have now is that our people are poor and we cannot run away from that.
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“Our people cannot afford so many things. So many of our citizens cannot even feed. Our emergency services are not dependent on patients paying. So, we start treatment whether you have money or not. But so many persons abuse this. After days of stabilization, we spend all our resources managing them.
“Our plan has always been to give us the money back to recover the cost of treating you. We have to replace the equipment for the next patient. UBTH is not a profit making organisation, we are providing social services. We are not interested in making money; government asked us to sustain our services not to make money.
Speaking on the theme of the golden jubilee celebration titled, “Advancing the legacy of quality healthcare”, he said the theme was prompted by the need to upgrade the hospital’s infrastructure and consolidate on the achievements made by the founding fathers with the introduction of more medical services for specialized cases.
“We have come a long way these past 49 years and have achieved a lot along this evolutionary journey. The successes and heights we have attained as a teaching hospital is because of the foresightedness and the labors of our founding fathers and heroes past. They set a solid foundation for us upon which every one of us that has come thereafter has built.
“We want to have major infrastructural makeover of our structures and equipment. We want to focus on cardiovascular and comprehensive cancer care. Cancer is the silent epidemic in Nigeria. The inconvenience families face is unimaginable.
“We want to attain self sustainability. To keep excelling as a training and continuous learning hub for healthcare workforce in West Africa and we are already doing that by training the staff. We want to be the destination of choice for quality healthcare solutions in West Africa and strategically positioned for markets,” he said.
