Butabika hospital has revealed that during the COVID-19 lockdown they were receiving over 900 patients every day, way above the 500 patients the facility receives in a normal day situation.
The revelation was made by the hospital deputy executive director, Dr. Juliet Naku while appearing before the Public Accounts Committee of parliament today to answer queries raised by the auditor general in his report of the financial year 2018-2019 about the hospital.
She also gave an account on the management of COVID-19 in the hospital, where she revealed that during the time of lockdown in the country they didn’t observe the ministry of health guidelines of social distancing to control the spread of COVID-19 because the hospital was overcrowded by in and out patients.
She explained that during that time of lockdown, they couldn’t discharge patients due to difficulties in transportation which caused congestion.
Naku said the patients they discharged during the lockdown never wanted to go back to their homes fearing to contract COVID-19. The problem was worsened by lack of transport at the time.
She further revealed that COVID-19 caused a lot of stress to their medical staff because they worked for longer hours than ever before and it also affected their budget because they had to provide food to a large number of people which they didn’t budget for.
Dr Naku also noted that since the lockdown was eased, many patients have now returned to their homes and they have fully followed the ministry of health guidelines on COVID-19since there is no congestion in the hospital.
She also noted that Butabika hospital has recorded no covid patients since the outbreak of the pandemic in March this year.
In the audit report, Butabika Hospital was faulted for failing to hit its revenue collections, having collected only Shs1.124Bn out of the Shs1.7Bn projections. The hospital management blamed the low revenue collections on failure to operationalize the new Alcohol and Drug Unit.
The auditors also pointed out that the Hospital received Shs14.399Bn but only spent Shs13.914Bn and sent Shs479.292Mn back to the Consolidated Fund.
This comes at the time the hospital has failed to fill up 145 staff positions, prompting management to send back Shs334Mn of staff wages back to Treasury.
During a physical inspection at Butabika Hospital, the auditors unearthed drugs that had expired way back in 2015 due to poor stock management or receiving unsolicited medicines from NMS.
