Nigeria lifts gunshot medical ban (partly in response to Bayo Ohu's death)

[Omolola Ijeoma Ogunyemi]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8306695.stm

Nigeria lifts gunshot medical ban

Nigeria has lifted a law which forced hospitals to withhold emergency treatment from victims of gun attacks until a police report had been filed.

Officials revoked the law, in place since the 1980s, over concerns about a rising death rate from bullet wounds. It comes weeks after newspaper editor

Bayo Ohu died from bullet wounds after a hospital reportedly waited for a police report rather than treat him. Nigeria is notorious for gun-related crime

including kidnapping and robbery. Earlier this year its commercial capital, Lagos, topped a poll of the world's most dangerous places to work.

The BBC's Raliya Zubairu, in Abuja, says the government is threatening to withdraw the licences of any clinics failing to abide by the new ruling.

'Inhuman and callous'

The killing of Mr Ohu, who worked on Nigeria's Guardian newspaper, increased the clamour to change the law on emergency treatment for gunshot

victims. He was attacked by gunmen in his home on 20 September. After his death senior politicians including Senator Osita Izunaso launched a campaign

to have the law changed. He told the senate: "A situation where our medical practitioners, on the basis of police report, refuse to treat victims of gunshots

who are left to die is inhuman and callous."

Police chief Uba Ringim confirmed that all police stations had been ordered to inform clinics in their vicinity that the rules had changed. "We have sent out

circulars and have warned our men not to query any hospital that treats accident or gunshot victims," Nigeria's This Day newspaper quoted him as saying.

"It is unfortunate that hospitals refuse to give care. What is important is to protect lives, treat them, give them all the attention and later contact the police

with all the information."

[Gemini]

The BBC should be more careful in its choice of words, even if a single Senator wants to claim that he has been able to get a bill enacted into law in just three weeks. The BBC should have found out whether the 'gunshot medical ban) was in fact a 'law', or a practice.  If it was a 'law', perhaps they should have been good enough to cite the law and let us know its proper name.  If it was a law, they might tell us when the bill to repeal it was given its first reading in the House of Representatives, or the Senate, and when it was signed into law, and what the name of the law was.

 

Of course the death of Bayo Ohu is tragic, and one would like to hear more of the facts on which the Nigerian Medical Association is basing its assertion that he was not refused medical treatment.  But it is not correct to say that doctors were legally barred from offering treatment to gunshot victims unless they produced a police report.  That some doctors have preferred to await such reports before treating the wounded is deeply disturbing.  But it was never a law, nor was it the universal unwavering practice of every doctor faced with a gunshot victim to refuse treatment without police reports.  Thank God.

 

Ayo