9. UNIVERSITY TEACHING HOSPITAL (UTH)
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Like the Supreme Court, which is the last court of appeal for all things legal, the University Teaching Hospital is the last resort for all things medical. Founded in 1934 shortly after Zambia’s capital was moved from Livingstone to a little-known town called Lusaka, the Lusaka Hospital (which is what they called it then) was opened to cater to the increasing number of patients in the new town.
The name Lusaka Hospital was short-lived. The newly constructed hospital was swiftly renamed University Teaching Hospital, commonly known among locals as UTH. The new name was fitting because the hospital became a practicing center for doctors, nurses, clinical officers, and other health professionals.
Today, the UTH, with a capacity of 1655 beds and a catchment population of about 2 million, is the largest hospital and main referral health institution in the country. Due to its high demand, the UTH doesn’t take every casualty and illness presented to it. In other words, I cannot, for example, go straight to UTH if I’ve got a headache or stomachache. Instead, I have to go to my local clinic and have that minor problem taken care of. Only when the doctors or nurses at my local clinic determine that they cannot handle my problem can I be referred to UTH. By ensuring that only serious casualties and major illnesses are handled, the patient population is somewhat reduced at UTH.
When it comes to training medical practitioners, the UTH is one of the nation’s greatest assets. To begin with, it acts as a repository for all the necessary equipment and specimens for a medical student to do her practicals. For engineering students, it’s easier to find old gadgets that you can use to build your model, or better still you can buy the needed spare parts. However, as a medical student, you have to practice with a real patient, and what better place to find these needed patients than at the hospital. That’s why UTH is in partnership with the University of Zambia (UNZA).
When medical students at UNZA reach their fifth year, they are moved to a new campus: Ridgeway, which happens to be near UTH so they can have access to real patients to perform their practicals.
Because the UTH is the biggest public tertiary hospital, it’s open 24/7, benefiting both medical students and patients suffering from major injuries and serious illnesses.
Aside from helping patients get better and allowing medical students to acquire their practical training, UTH also acts as a small-scale business center. Most people in Zambia are unemployed and make their living through informal businesses such as selling fruits by the roadside. Nationalist Road, where UTH is located is populated with these small-scale, fruit-selling businesses. However it’s important to note that the prices of fruit near UTH aren’t friendly. For instance, if you decided to buy a banana or an orange there, you’d spend twice as much. To avoid these high costs, some people tend to carry with them fruits bought from elsewhere whenever they visit a patient at UTH.
It’s evident that selling fruits near UTH is good business or else vendors would’ve stopped selling there. Not all people remember to carry fruits when they visit a patient. Sometimes, a visitor would carry apples, but the patient inside would say he’d like to eat pears. The visitor then would’ve no choice but to buy from the nearby vendors. To all who give business to vendors on Nationalist Road, please continue with your generosity, for your kwachas and ngwees have a double benefit: helping patients get the needed nutrients from fruits as well as helping the vendors put food on the table.
There has been criticism about the standard of treatment people receive at UTH. Many complain that doctors don’t do much for the patients and that they can’t even give them medicines. Instead, they just write prescriptions for various medicines, which patients themselves are required to purchase elsewhere. As much as we like to complain about the sub-standard treatment at UTH, we should realize that the problem isn’t with the doctors nor is it with UTH itself. It’s bigger than that.
Doctors at UTH are well-qualified and have the heart to treat patients to the best of their abilities. The challenge is the lack of medical resources available at UTH. The hospital doesn’t have state-of-the-art equipment that would enable doctors to efficiently do their work. That’s why well-to-do citizens prefer going to private hospitals for treatment. However, many citizens aren’t well-to-do, so they have no choice but to come to UTH. This creates another problem: patient congestion. This problem is so big that it’s almost impossible to see a UTH doctor the minute your case is referred to the hospital. Instead, you’re put on the waiting list. Only those in critical condition are the ones who see the doctor immediately after being referred.
If we depend on UTH so much, one wonders why we don’t equip the hospital with modern medical machinery. But if it’s a place where the poor get treated, then there’s very little incentive to improve the hospital. Even rich government officials never go to UTH for medical treatment. The late President Levy Mwanawasa was taken to France when he was ill in 2008. Many ministers go to South Africa for their medical treatment. Perhaps the biggest problem is that government officials — the people who are responsible for improving conditions at UTH never get their treatment there. This means they would never know how badly the hospital needs improvement and medical machinery.
President Michael Sata had diagnosed this problem too. He was famously against government officials flying to South Africa for medical treatment. He argued that if these government officials didn’t think they’d get better treatment at UTH, then they needed to make sure that conditions at the hospital were improved. President Sata went so far as to say that if he were ill, he’d spend his time in UTH rather than wasting government money flying out of the country.
We’ve all had a connection with UTH. If you’ve never been admitted there, you probably have a family member or friend who was admitted there. It’s for this reason that we should fight hard to ensure conditions at UTH are improved so citizens can get better treatment.
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