A Senior Assistant to the Lagos State Governor on Public Healthcare, Dr Yewande Adeshina, has reiterated the need for medical doctors to ensure that Ebola patients are quarantined as soon as they test positive to the virus.
On a Channels Television’s programme, Sunrise Daily, on Wednesday, Dr Yewande said that the outbreak of the Ebola Virus Disease had brought back panic.
She expressed fears that the outbreak had become a burden for medical doctors, who are treating patients with the fear that whatever ailment they had could be Ebola.
”People die with the first diagnosis of Ebola and it has become a burden because the minute Ebola is mentioned, we have to act as if it is an Ebola case.
”I really want to seek the opportunity to appeal to our health care providers, that we have given them training, standard operating procedures and all the information they need to be able to treat Ebola appropriately and make a different diagnosis and to refers patient to the Ebola treatment center.”
Dr Yewande stressed that all health workers needed to do was to keep the patient in their facilities and call the Ebola helplines for the rapid response team to come and access the patient on a more comprehensive level.
”And if the test came out positive they would evacuate and decontaminate the facilities but if it came out negative recommendation would be made and the patient life’s goes on,” she said.
Dr Yewande said that the panic that the Ebola virus outbreak was creating had made doctors refused to see patients.
“They rather refer patients to the treatment centre that is not proactive in treating patients. When patients die, they don’t have enough information to confirm the cause of the death and automatically they call it Ebola.”
She, however, said doctors do not need Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) to diagnosis Ebola, if there was a standard precaution in place .
“The issue is not the PPE . Precaution should be taken by doctors to wear their gloves and white coat before they touch a patient,” she said, emphasising that keeping patient in a separate room, would streamline the chances of getting infected.
Emphasising the need to ensure that patients suspected to have contracted the virus are quarantined and monitored, she said that the outbreak in Port Harcourt occurred because health workers lost contact with a patient under observation.
The government has continued to carry out measures to reduce the chances of the spread of the disease, with some group of people in the different local government, going to house and check people’s temperature.
“We are now at peace that we have been able to silent the Ebola outbreak, because we have not seen any new Lagos infection and suspect. If the man had not gone to Port Harcourt we would have been singing bye bye to Ebola by now,” she said.
There have been clamour for increase in the allowance of doctors handling cases of Ebola, but the medical doctor said that the jobs of the doctors were like that of soldiers under an oath.
”We are like soldiers going to war and when you are drafted as a doctor you have taken the hypocrisies oath, you are at war with disease. I don’t expect any special compensation for being a doctor because that is what I stand up for. Does soldier get special compensation when they go to war? Once you put on your uniform you go to war. You don’t start negotiating before you go to war. So a doctor is at war with Ebola because diseases are our enemies and we should not be negotiating over what we have taken an oath to do.”
She said that the issues of compensation was a hard debate, insisting that there were other allowances that they had. According to her, asking for extra payment specially was not necessary.
