By Amina Hilda
Some inhabitants of Maroua among them patients have accused the staff and management of the Maroua Regional Hospital of engaging in corrupt practices and offering poor services to patients.
According to sources, patients are poorly received in emergency services. They are reportedly given poor quality of medical and surgical emergency care. Corruption, scams and others, they say. have aswell become common at the Maroua regional hospital.
Few days back, the hospital was equipped with high-end equipments. It was inaugurated by the French Ambassador to Cameroon.
“It is worth a thousand times to go to private hospitals or, to die with dignity at home than to go to the Maroua Regional Hospital where you are welcomed like beggars,” a resident stated.
Sometimes you come to the room, you find the nurses playing games on their cell phones. It’s up to you to wait or not, it’s your problem” a patient stated.
By dint of scamming the sick, sources said, these health personnel have even forgotten the notion of urgency, because the start of any care is conditioned by money.
“Has the hospital become a place of business? This approach undoubtedly endangers the lives of patients, thus worsening their prognosis, health being a right, life being sacred and inviolable, and nothing beats life. Money is not worth life my dear sworn members,” a former lawmaker stated.
Despite the prescriptions of the Prime Minister, Head of Government and the Minister of Public Health, which aimed at improving reception and care in the Reception and Emergency Services in hospitals insalubrious acts persist, making people suspicious of public hospitals.
In a letter dated April 5, 2022, the Minister of Public Health, Dr Malachie Manaouda reminded the heads of health facilities of the instructions relating to reception, orientation and care of sick people.
Some patients said, they are poorly received in emergency services. They say the situation is worsened by poor quality of medical and surgical emergency care, corruption, scams that have become commonplace at the Maroua regional hospital.
“It has become a business, without money there is no care. And even if you pay, the service, the rest of your medicines are confiscated, sometimes stolen by the same nurses who provide care,” another patient stated.
To another person who said he assisted a relative at the facility once, “the regional hospital of Maroua is knockout, if you don’t have money and by bad luck you find yourself lying there for any emergency, know that you are not entitled to care and your corpse will simply be recorded in the completed report notebook fumes the dad of a patient hospitalized here”.
