Health

Appropriate diagnoses of patients’ conditions by medical personnel, or lack thereof, in most Nigerian hospitals have come under intense public scrutiny. The worry is that, in extreme cases, such errors, when they occur, lead to avoidable loss of lives. Despite global advancement in medicine, hospitals and health facilities in sub-Saharan Africa, and in particular, Nigeria, have become, more or less, death traps, with patients constantly falling victim to what is glibly dismissed as human error. In fairness to Nigerian doctors, such errors are also noticeable in other developed economies. The complaint here is about the quantum and regularity. By definition, misdiagnosis may occur when a health practitioner acts on often unverified information about a patient’s condition, either due to non-compliance with standard operating procedures that require thorough clinical examinations through laboratory tests or sheer incompetence. The former is possible due to the absence of the infrastructur...