FOREMOST baby making factory, the Lagos Island Maternity Hospital, Lagos, established in 1959, clocked 54, on May 13, this year.

Getting the management of the hospital to speak since last month was not an easy task as The Guardian was first directed to get approval from the Lagos State Commissioner of Health. The approval from the commissioner came only recently before the hospital’s Managing Director/Chief Executive Officer, Dr. Oreose Donald Imosemi, agreed to speak.

Imosemi, who spoke on the challenges faced by the 54-year-old institution and what is being done to modernize it, said the place had played prominent role since it first started operation in the 50s, when it was apparently the only General Hospital in the whole of Lagos, up till the ‘70s and ‘80s, when a few other General Hospitals began to spring up.

According to him, “Despite the fact that, over time, other hospitals have sprung up to complement what we do, the hospital is still unique in the sense that it is a stand-alone mono-specialist hospital that is just into obstetrics and gynaecology.”

“And if you look at its structure, it has 250 beds devoted only to maternity and gynaecological services. There is rarely any other institution, either tertiary or General Hospital, that has the kind of capacity that we have in terms of the number of beds,” he said, adding, “that makes us the ultimate referral point where other hospitals – General Hospitals, maternal and childcare centres, are short of space and beds because they don’t have the number that we have.”

“Of course, alongside the fact that we have such large number of beds, cots and cradles, we have a proportionate personnel level to be able to function and almost invariably, too, we have the infrastructural capacity to match with this number.”

Alongside the number of beds, Imosemi said: “What further underlines the hospital’s functionality is our capacity to respond to what we call emergent obstetrics.”

While explaining that most of the cases of women dying in pregnancy usually occur around when they are in labour and the immediate period after labour, usually within the first one week and they are all due to event of labour and a few days up till one month after labour, he said the emergencies that spring up during this period are usually very challenging and they stretch and task the capacity of a number of General Hospitals. This is where Island Maternity owes its uniqueness in the sense that where others have problems coping with emergencies because they don’t have enough beds, personnel and they cannot perform on a 24 hourly basis, Island has the capacity, almost inelastic capacity to cope with emergencies on a 24/7 basis.”

He said when all the hospitals, including private hospitals in Lagos and even outside Lagos State such as Ogun, Oyo and others have emergencies, they find succour here because the Governor of Lagos State, Batunde Fashola (SAN) has emphasized that no pregnant woman who comes in an emergency situation should be denied care because she does not have money.

“We have a mandate to do what we have to do to ensure that the woman and the baby survive even when she doesn’t have the money,” he stressed.

Based on this awareness, he deposed that cases that have either been managed elsewhere but unsuccessfully or people that do not have money rush to the hospital, which has the capacity to handle them.

“This means that we are ever working round the clock attending to these emergencies in addition to our own basic care as an institution,” said Imosemi.

He said the basic functions of the hospital include taking care of  gynaecology cases, which include women who are not pregnant, who have gynaecological challenges, bleeding problem, fertility problem, fibroid and cancer, making it a tertiary centre.

Asked to comment on the quality of care at the hospital, Imosemi said: “In terms of quality of care, the government in the last 10 years, particularly in the last four, five, six years, has massively invested in infrastructure. In Island Maternity, government ensures that it gets further rehabilitated. In the last couple of years, government had ensured we are more functional.  For example, as a specialist hospital, we own and run three operating theatres. That is to say, we can attend to three life-threatening emergencies simultaneously with access to 24-hour un-interrupted power supply.”

He added: “When you talk of comfort, the government has provided light but we, as an institution, are working along with the board of the hospital to take initiatives to ensure that we come up with a situation where we will have private wards that provide services that are comparable with what obtains abroad. Our campaign has begun to yield fruits. We have had individuals and corporate bodies that have accepted to adopt our private wards for a start and then the general wards. What the adoption means, is that, these people will come in and working with us on the template that have been carefully laid by the board and getting the support of the government, we will improve the quality of what we have in the private wards. The wards are going to undergo significant face-lift, provide all the basic things that would guarantee comfort.

When asked to compare Island Maternity to other high-class institutions in Nigeria and then say where Island Maternity belongs, Dr. Imosemi said most of them are privately run for profit and do not have the capacity to handle the number of cases that the hospital runs.

“For the heavily challenged Nigerians and Lagosians, who need to be helped, Island Maternity continues to remain the melting point.

If you look at the statistics monthly, in recent times, we have between 250 to about 350 deliveries and this is happening at the time the Lagos State government is building hospitals and a number of deliveries have shifted to several other places where deliveries are taking place in the state, close to or well over 50 per cent of the cases that are handled here are emergencies and many of the cases, if they do not have money, we still handle them to save lives. But the private institutions, with due respect to them, would not do that because they are private sector establishments,” he said.

On what is being done to reposition the 54-year-old hospital to modernize it? Imosemi said: “The government through the Ministry of Health already has a mission of the kind of healthcare system it wants to have. However, Island Maternity Hospital, as an institution, has a vision, which we, in conjunction with the board, are articulating very clearly in what is called ‘service chartered document,’ which is coming out very soon and which is what the state government asked all its ministries, departments and agencies to be doing. Our vision is to ensure that we evolve into a world-class institution that provides quality that meets with international standard. Here, we have ensured that all our activities are continually evolving to meet global best standards. For example, if there is an emergency, like an emergency cesarean section, between 30 to 45 minutes of arrival, that woman should be operated upon. That is our target here, too. We are achieving that. And one of the ways we have done that is to increase our capacity.”

“The government has put in place a machinery to ensure that even when we lose a woman, it is going to review such death to find out why the woman died. Is it that the government did not provide enough or the workers did not provide enough or that the case had been mismanaged somewhere? If the case was mismanaged, is the government going to allow that to continue? So, there is already in place a systematic review, which we called Maternal Death Review (MDR ). It is a systematized thing comparable to what obtains abroad,” he explained.