There was pandemonium at the Edo Specialist Hospital in Benin, when members of the Nigerian Security and Civil Defence Corps and officers of the Department of State Services (DSS) on Monday, engaged in a confrontation, which left people injured.
The altercation purportedly started when DSS officials brought in one of their men who had collapsed during a meeting in their office, and the medical staff were alleged to have reacted in an unprofessional manner.
It was gathered that calm was only restored with the help of the Chief Security Officer of Government House and the police, who were called from the Oba Market Police Station.
At the end of the chaos, several people, including private security guards and female NSCDC personnel were injured.
An official of the DSS said: “We were in a meeting when the person we brought to the hospital slumped, and he was rushed to our health facility to check his pulse. We then rushed him to the Edo Specialist Hospital, which is the closest to our office, but the reception we got there was poor.
“It was our people that had to bring our colleague down from the vehicle. When you go to the hospital, courtesy demands that you bring the patient down and attend to him or her; at least show commitment, but right in the car, they said they cannot carry him and we have to carry him down ourselves.”
However, when contacted, Dr. David Odiko, the Medical Director of the hospital, stated that although the DSS staff refused to acknowledge the patient’s death, the attending physician had swiftly attended to him.
He said: “I was not in the hospital when the incident happened because I was in the court for a case. It was from there that they called me, and when I got to the hospital, they had left, but I met policemen on the ground.
“They brought him as an emergency case. He was said to have slumped, and the doctor on duty went to check, and he said he met the guy lying on the seat of the car and that the patient wasn’t breathing.
“He couldn’t see the chest and abdomen moving, then he proceeded to check if there was still a pulse and heartbeat which were also absent. He said he still proceeded to do CPR, but there was no response.
“The diagnosis the doctor made was that he was brought in dead, and they said they were not going to take that, and they moved him into our facility and dropped him on the floor. I was told that another group of personnel injured the Civil Defence personnel that was on duty on her head.”
