In a shocking revelation over the weekend, the Chief Medical Director, CMD of Lagos University Teaching Hospital, LUTH, Professor Akin Oshibogun, revealed that LUTH utilizes up to 5,000 litres of diesel daily to run its range of 10 installed generators to operate at optimal capacity in the face of critical shortage in public electrical power supply.
Professor Oshibogun disclosed this during an oversight visit of the Senate Committee on Health to LUTH.
He noted that apart from funding, electricity was one of the greatest challenges confronting the hospital.
In his words, “If you asked me 20 times on the greatest challenge of LUTH, I will tell you it is electricity. Electricity is a challenge because we are now running our own power generating plant. The implication of this is that many of the services rendered depend on electricity, and though government has supported us to procure generators, there is a cost to running the generators.
“On full load, we utilise up to 5,000 litres of diesel a day, however, we try as much as possible to shed load, but even with the load shedding, we still use at least 2000-3000 liters of diesel a day because of the critical areas we must power,” Oshibogun observed.
Furthermore, he told members of the committee that at least 5 Megawatts of electricity was required to run the hospital, but lamented that the main powerhouse which is over 30 years old had lost efficiency and could no longer power the entire hospital.
“Major equipment such as CT scanner and MRI are not run on public power supply. Our linear accelerator which has been running for 5-6 years has not run on public power for one minute since it started. We have been running two sets of generators to power it, one in the morning and the other in the evening.”
He said because of its sensitive nature, the linear accelerator runs continuously on generator at great economic cost.
“We cannot shut it down and even when there is public power supply, we insist it must be on generator because the fluctuations of public power supply can damage it and it will be very expensive to repair.
“If it shuts down accidentally, there is no one who can restart it in Nigeria; we need to bring in people from abroad to restart it.”
He argued that if the power issue was addressed, the volume of finances on diesel and maintainance would be reduced.
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