Smell of rotting corpse forces Lagos hospital to treat its patients in an outside shed

MEDICAL workers at the General Hospital in the Orile Agege suburb of Lagos suspended work inside the building and had to treat patients outside yesterday due to the heavy stench of a rotting body coming from one of its wards.

 

In an unfortunate twist, staff decided to treat outpatients in a shed outside the main building as the smell of a decomposing corpse was too string within the building. Patients were treated outside a large shed where new patients queued to collect cards before they were eventually taken to different wards for further attention.

 

Apparently, the doors of the accident and emergency clinic, where the stench was coming from which is located close to the Pharmacy Unit, had to be locked yesterday, to keep the odour in. Nurses evicted from their station were insistent that the door was not opened and it took hospital officials more than two hours to evacuate the corpse.

 

One patient said: “I came in here around 5am and there was no power supply at the time and the generator was also not working at the time but there was no odour. I was already on a drip inside the ward when this foul odour hit the ward and in a matter of minutes, we were all asked to leave the ward.

 

My drip was detached and condemned by the nurses and we were all taken outside and sat on the benches by the Pharmacy Unit. It took them more than two hours to decide what to do with the corpse."

 

One member of staff added: “What happened was that the State Environmental Health Monitoring Unit was supposed to have evacuated the corpse but they said they did not have fuel to get here. The corpse was a coroner case and there was nothing we could have done.

 

“The affected section was just the clinic and the patients were taken to another place pending the time disinfection would be completed. We usually wait for 24 hours after disinfecting an area before patients would be allowed to go back there.”