After 109 days of darkness in the University College Hospital, Ibadan, Oyo State, over non-payment of N495 million electricity bills, PUNCH Healthwise investigation reveals how the power outage led to avoidable deaths of patients as doctors used torchlights and flashlights on their phones to provide care. SODIQ OJUROUNGBE reports

on a chilly December evening, 2024, a family of four was rushed to the Accident and Emergency unit of UCH, Ibadan, Oyo State, gasping for air. The cause of their distress was a gas explosion that rocked their home.

But as the medical team battled to save their lives, they were confronted with a harsh reality – the hospital was without an electricity supply.

The automatic ventilator system, a lifeline for patients struggling to breathe, lay dormant, its digital screens dark and unresponsive. The medical team was forced to resort to a manual ventilator, a primitive device that required someone to press a bag, known as an Ambu bag (a hand-held device that delivers positive pressure ventilation to patients who aren’t breathing well), to push air into the lungs of the patients.

It was a laborious and exhausting process, one that required a team of three medical students to take turns pressing the bag for 30 minutes each.

One of them saddled with the responsibility of pressing the hand-held device told PUNCH Healthwise that the lack of power supply which forced them to use the manual ventilator led to the deaths of two out of the four victims of the gas explosion brought to UCH.

The medical student who was at the A&E unit when two of the family members died around 2 am the next day, argued that they could have survived if the hospital had power.

He explained that the automatic ventilator system, with its precise and consistent air delivery, might have made all the difference.

He recalled, “I was one of the students pressing the Ambu bag. We worked in shifts, trying to keep the patients alive. But it was clear that we were fighting a losing battle. The manual ventilator just wasn’t enough.

“It was heart-breaking. We did everything we could, but it just wasn’t enough. I keep thinking about what could have been if only we had power.”



https://punchng.com/109-day-darkness-how-uch-doctors-attend-to-patients-with-torchlight/