The disturbing news from Port Harcourt on Monday was that eight medical facilities in the city refused to treat a gunshot victim taken there for urgent attention.
It is even more worrisome that the victim was a police officer who sustained multiple gunshot wounds and his intestines gushed out following a gun battle with criminal gangs.
The victim was fortunate to end up at the police clinic in the city before it was too late.
Reacting to the attitude of the hospitals, the Rivers state Police Commissioner, Polycarp Emeka Nwaoyi, called on hospitals to treat persons brought to their respective facilities with gunshot wounds. He said victims of gunshot wounds should be treated irrespective of the circumstances that caused the injury.
The rejection of the wounded police officer who must have been ferried from one hospital to the other by fellow cops is inexplicable. Hospitals are known to reject victims of gunshot wounds without a police signature. So, what excuses did the hospitals have for refusing to attend to a fatally injured police officer brought in by his colleagues?
The incidents of hospitals turning back victims of gunshot became rampant until July, 2017 when the 8th Senate passed the Bill on the Compulsory Treatment and Care of Gunshot Victims. The passing of the bill was to put paid to the plight of people especially the innocent ones who were daily exposed to all manner of security situations like armed robbery, terrorism and accidental discharge that pervade the country. The Bill was in concurrence with the one earlier passed by the House of Representatives.
Speaking on the passage of the Bill, the President of the 8th Senate, Dr. Abubakar Bukola Saraki, stated that not “every victim of a gunshot wound is a criminal; hence, it is important that a legal framework be put in place to avoid unnecessary loss of lives.
“By the passage of this Bill, the Senate has moved to ensure that every hospital in Nigeria, both public and private, must accept to treat victims of gunshot wounds without any clearance from the police. What we have done is to ensure that everyone is entitled to medical treatment, irrespective of the cause of the shooting. We should reserve judgment for the criminal justice system, and leave healthcare for the medical professionals.”
The Bill also ensured that every person including security agents should render all possible assistance to any person with gunshot wounds and ensure that the person was taken to the nearest hospital for treatment.
Furthermore, the Bill mandated that no person with gunshot wounds should be refused immediate and adequate treatment by any hospital in Nigeria whether or not initial monetary deposit is paid.
In our editorial welcoming the development, we had noted that advocacy for unfettered access to medicare in public and private hospitals by victims of gunshot wounds had been in the public domain for long before the passage of the Bill. It, however, came to the front burner following the gruesome murder of Bayo Ohu of the Guardian Newspaper in his Lagos residence in 2009.
A private hospital in Lagos to which Ohu was taken after the attack refused to treat him in that critical condition as the doctors insisted on receiving police report. Ohu died on his way to a general hospital. Several other victims have suffered the same fate as Ohu’s.
The police authorities, reacting to Ohu’s death, said there was no law forbidding health workers from treating a gunshot victim. They said a hospital should treat its patients but inform the police later.
The Presidency at the time was on the same page with the 8th National Assembly when it gave a directive to medical personnel to attend to emergency cases including gunshot victims, without police clearance. The Federal Government made the declaration at the swearing-in ceremony of 342 foreign trained medical doctors and six dentistry graduates in Abuja.
With that declaration, it went without saying that the Bill would receive express Presidential assent when it was passed. But with the recent development in Rivers state, it is not certain if the Bill was assented to before former President Muhammadu Buhari exited power in May, this year.
We call on the Federal Government to do the needful about the Bill as a matter of urgency. Hospitals are sanctuaries for the sick and the injured. The first duty of a doctor is to save human lives. While some health workers might have been arrested for treating wounded armed robbers in times past, there could be no justifiable reason for hospitals to insist on police report even when it was obvious that the gunshot patients were victims and not criminals as shown by the Port Harcourt experience.
The Hippocratic Creed, which doctors have sworn to uphold, does not make any provision for getting a police nod. Neglecting wounded patients is thus a criminal breach of the professional code of doctors.
