The presidential election may have come and gone but the scars are still lingering especially in Rivers State owing to the lives it allegedly consumed.
The day turned sour for a pregnant woman in Port Harcourt as she was allegedly rejected by three different hospitals, including the famous government-owned Braithwaite Memorial Specialist Hospital, BMSH, while she was in labour
It was learnt from close relatives and neighbours of the woman, identified simply as Mrs Emem, that she entered labour around 2 a.m. on Saturday, 23rd February, 2019 and was immediately rushed to the Braithwaite Memorial Specialist Hospital, at Old GRA, Port Harcourt by good spirited neighbours in the Diobu axis where she resides as her husband was said to be away on work engagements outside the city.
But on getting to BSMH, the doctors around, reportedly rejected her, citing the presidential election which was about to begin by 8 a.m. that day as reason for their action.
The sources went further to say that every plea by the woman’s relatives and neighbours who took her to the hospital to persuade the doctors fell on deaf ears despite her critical condition as she was already bleeding.
Even after the hospital officials were reminded that election does not affect the work of medical doctors and nurses, they still refused to attend to the woman, the sources said.
The people who brought the woman later took her to the Meridien hospital at D-Line area of Port Harcourt where she was also rejected, using election as their reason. Every plea also fell on deaf ears, prompting the people to take the woman to another unnamed hospital which also refused to attend to her.
Helpless as it seems, the people decided to take the woman to a home care nurse but by then, she had lost almost all the blood in her body, leading to her death.
The source said: “By the time we got to the nurse, she had turned pale and her palm was pure white. They could not save her. Those hospitals are very wicked, especially BMH. If they had attended to her, she wouldn’t have died. Now she has died and her baby also died in her womb,” one of the neighbours lamented”.
We further gathered that the late woman left three children behind while her remains had been taken to her place at Akwa Ibom for burial.
Authorities at BMSH have not responded to inquiries on the matter at press time.
Meanwhile, an official of the hospital, who spoke on condition of anonymity, exonerated the doctors of BMSH from any complicity in the woman’s death.
He added: “As long as I’m concerned, our doctors are professionals and caring. If the people that brought the woman actually met the doctors and if the doctors are free, they would definitely attend to them. We have been handling such cases. It could be that the woman’s situation had gone out of hand before they brought her here.
“You know that some of these women, when they are pregnant and you tell them to go and do a scan, some of them don’t go until it is late. They prefer to go to herbal homes or prayer houses. Some of them also refuse to be delivered through CS and it is only when their cases become precarious that they will now rush to hospital and by then it is late. It’s unfortunate.”
