A good number of patients who were admitted and later discharged from Masaka Regional Referral Hospital have refused to return to their respective homes because of free meals served at the facility, Mr Eleazer Mugisha, the Masaka Hospital principal has revealed.
Mr Mugisha told TheUgandan on Wednesday that in the past two months, some patients have been missing out on meals as a results of their colleagues who are discharged and decline to go home as they reach on the serving table and find nothing yet meals are cooked depending on the Hospital patient register.
“We have since learnt that a good number of our patients who are discharged never went back home but instead stayed in the wards so that they continue receiving our free meals,” Mr Mugisha said holding that they are worried over the increasing number of such people since food meals cooked at the facility is specifically for only admitted patients.
Different parts of Uganda have been hit by drought and famine this year and the dry spell has been as a result of climate change.
Masaka Regional Hospital offers three meals to its patients daily whom they give porridge with milk on breakfast, and posho and beans as lunch and supper. On Wednesdays, the patients are served as special meal of Pilao (meat and rice) daily, spending Shs 15million on meals monthly without a supplementary budget to cater for the excess number of people.
When asked why he could not want to return to his home, a man who identified himself as Ssalongo Kamoga said he could not leave free meals at the hospital and go back to his hunger stricken village.
“My son, you don’t know what is going on in the villages, there is nothing to eat and if am sent back I may end up starving to death,” a resident of Kyanamukaaka sub- county, Kamoga said
Annet Komugisha, a patient care taker revealed to our reporter that many ‘genuine patients’ end up missing food because those who were discharged and refused to go are the first to arrive at the serving table.
Meanwhile, discharged patients are also causing overclouding in the hospital wards at night as they occupy beds meant for patients and Hospital authorities have vowed to screen them and those found to have been discharged will be chased away.
Meanwhile, two top officials of the Regional Referral Hospital are in trouble for alleged embezzlement of billions of Shillings. They are Dr. Florence Tugumisirize, the Director and the Principal Hospital Administrator, Ereazer Mugisha.
The duo was picked up in a night raid by police and officers from the State House Drug monitoring Unit paralyzing health service delivery to patients. Five other officials attached to the finance department whose particulars haven’t been established have also been arrested.
Some of the operatives who conducted the raid said on condition of anonymity that the suspects are wanted for the theft of billions of Shillings. According to one of the sources, the officials are implicated in the Auditor General’s and State House Health Monitoring Audit Unit reports for failure to account for over 5billion Shillings.
