Do patients overstay at Mulago because of FREE meals?

Mar 07, 2016

After treatment and recovery, patients allegedly pretend to have forgotten where they reside.

Mulago hospital is stuck with a number of people who have overstayed in the wards even after recovering following treatment.  

The five patients including a woman in mid 30s have spent more than five months in the wards.  

The woman was admitted at the neurosurgery ward after she was knocked by a speeding vehicle and sustained a wound on the head. She recovered but has declined to vacate the ward.

"At the time of the admission these patients were suffering from strokes, diabetes and severe anaemia, we treated them and recovered but when we ask for their residence they pretend as if they have forgotten where they stay," the sub in charge of Ward 4B Jane Bayonjo said.

Bayonjo thinks that maybe the adjustments to the meals the hospital serves its in-patients, with a special diet introduced has made them stay in the hospital.

She said two of the patients are foreigners in their mid-70s, one a Tanzanian while the other is from Rwanda.

Bayonjo said although the hospital takes care of them, they are faced with a challenge of dressing them.

The hospital is also treating two unknown male patients who have spent three weeks in the hospital.

Previously, up to 1,500 in-patients at the hospital were fed with plain porridge for breakfast and posho (maize meal) and beans for lunch and dinner. Nowadays, a new meal timetable features a much improved diet. 

A protein-carbohydrate-rich breakfast of eggs and porridge (maize or soya) mixed with milk, and sometimes plain milk, is what patients now wake up to.

For lunch and dinner the patients eat beef, rice, peas, pasted groundnuts mixed with silver fish (mukene) and matooke (green bananas) cabbage, depending on the day's timetable.   

Peter Mbanjitale, the hospital's senior catering officer recently told New Vision the improvement in the nutrition excited patients and caretakers.  

"Previously, we used to serve lunch late because we thought that if we served patients at 1.00pm, then by 8.00pm they would be hungry.

Mbanjitale said with the new meals coupled with them being served in time patients can now take their drugs promptly as recommended by medical personnel. 

Patients, in the past, would refuse to take drugs on an empty stomach, he added. 

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