Following the frequent outages in the University College Hospital (UCH), Ibadan, the members of staff of the institution have resolved to work between 8:00 am and 4:00 pm daily with effect from Tuesday, April 2 till power is restored in the hospital.
The chairman of the Joint Action Committee (JAC), the umbrella body of hospital unions, Oludayo Olabampe, disclosed this in Ibadan.
The Ibadan Electricity Distribution Company (IBEDC) disconnected power supply to UCH due to accumulated debt.
Olabampe, therefore, said the hospital had been without electricity since March 19 and could not continue like that.
The chairman explained that, “Workers would now work from 8:00 am to 4:00 pm only because it is dangerous and risky to attend to patients in that situation.”
“We held a meeting with the management this morning but the issue is that there is no electricity. So, from today, Tuesday, April 2, we will work until 4:00 p.m. we are not attending to any patient after 4:00 p.m.
“This means that we won’t admit patients because the nurses that will take care of them will not be available after 4:00 pm, and you don’t expect patients to be on their own from 4:00 pm till 8:00 am the next day.
“If patients need blood tests, the lab will not work” and “if they need radiography, the radiographers will not work.
“The dieticians in charge of their food, too, will not work after 4:00 pm. We also gave management another 14-day ultimatum, which started counting from March 27, and if, after 14 days, power is not restored, we will embark on a seven-day warning strike,” said the union leader.
Reacting to the move, the UCH chief medical director, Jesse Otegbayo, said the union did not officially write to the management before taking the decision.
He said, “I have not heard about that. If they are going to do that, they should write to management officially, and then we will respond.
“There are rules that govern government service. You can’t just decide what hours you work and expect to be paid full-time.
“If they go ahead to do that without informing management officially, management has a way of applying the rules to pay them for the number of hours which they worked.
“The proper thing is for them to put it in writing because they didn’t write officially to the management before taking the decision,” Otegbayo said.
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