The Garki National Hospital, Abuja, said on Thursday that it had about 22 human corpses abandoned by their relatives.

The hospital’s Group Medical Director, Dr. Elijah Miner said this during a visit of a delegation from the National Human Rights Commission to his office.
The NHRC delegation was led by the Executive Secretary, Prof Bem Angwe.

Miner said some of the deceased were victims of bomb blasts.

He said two of the 22 corpses were infants and that some the bodies had been in the hospital’s morgue for about five years.
He said some of the corpses were brought to the hospital without head and could not be identified.

He said the hospital was planning to bury the corpses, having secured a court warrant to dispose of the bodies.

Angwe urged Nigerians to desist from abandoning the remains of their relations in hospital morgues across the country.
In a statement, NHRC’s Chief Press Officer, Fatimah Agwai Mohammad, quoted Angwe as arguing that it was incumbent on family members of the deceased to pay their last respect to their deceased relatives by giving them decent burials.

Angwe commended the management of the hospital for not rejecting indigent patients due to lack of funds, saying “this singular act has changed the perception of people about the hospital”.

He urged the Federal Government and well meaning Nigerians to make conscious efforts to upgrade the quality of health care delivery system and make it a priority.

Angwe regretted that Nigerians have been subjected to buying drugs from unauthorised sources resulting in needless deaths due to inadequacies that exist in our health care system.
He assured the hospital management that his agency would work out modalities to ensure that patients, who were treated on compassionate grounds, but failed to fulfil their financial obligations, were made to do so.

Angwe who urged the government to put in place accessible and quality healthcare system to address issues of avoidable deaths, assured Nigerians that the NHRC would issue an advisory to the Federal Government in this regard so that even the indigent members of the society would not have hiccups in enjoying quality healthcare.

The hospital’s Medical Director, Dr. Essen Nyomudime, said the institution’s management was determined to transform the hospital from average healthcare facility to “a centre of excellence even though the hospital does not enjoy any subvention from the government”.

Nyomudime said the goal of the hospital was to save lives hence it could not afford to turn back patients who could not afford to pay their medical bills, adding that “in the past few years, the hospital has given out over N27m as discount on medical services.”

He disclosed that so far, “the hospital has carried out 43 open heart surgeries, 12 kidney transplants, and has also done some IVF at very subsidized rates.”