Duro Soleye Hospital, Ikeja.

Address: 34 Allen Avenue, Ikeja, Lagos. Nigeria.
Tel: 08060161650
Website: n/a
My Rating: 1.5/5

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Review by CE

This is part of a 2-part review. Click here to read full post.


It was a Saturday night. I had just returned home from the hospital after my brother regained consciousness following a surgery (entirely different story for another day) and was told that my five week old son, Raymond, was running a slight temperature. It didn’t seem like anything to worry about at the time, but at about 2am Sunday morning, he started stooling. It was about an hour apart between stools but by 6am it was down to 45 minutes.

And then I made a big mistake. We rushed him to Duro Soleye Hospital (hyp) at 34, Allen Avenue in Ikeja. We got there by 7:30am and didn’t get to see a doctor till 9am. Apparently the doctor who was on night duty was ‘fagged out’ after a night of staying awake watching TV (there were no emergencies that night. I asked!) and so was ready to go home. We pleaded for nearly 15 minutes before he agreed to see him ‘as an act of mercy.’ The doctor cursorily examined him, pronounced him severely dehydrated and admitted him. Then the Doctor left the building.

It took another 45 minutes before anyone came to take us to the room. A nurse brought us Oral Rehydration Therapy solution (ORT) and told us to give it to him every 5 minutes. He was already visibly weak and his ruddy complexion had paled into an ashen grey. My wife was in tears as she tried to give him the ORT. But scarcely had we begun when a student doctor and a nurse stormed in saying they needed to set up an IV line (or Drip, as it is more commonly known).

What followed was the most agonising hour of my family’s life. Raymond was pinned down by two nurses while the student doctor began piercing the 5 week old baby’s body in search for a vein. My son’s crying was horrendous to hear. So between comforting my wife and praying for a lucky break for this student doctor who was so obviously out of his depth, I was completely disoriented. They tried his wrists, they tried his feet, they tried his arms - prodding, piercing, twisting, turning and all the while he shrieked.

This went on for 45 minutes and his cries were getting weaker while my wife’s were getting stronger. I stormed into the nursery and told them to stop. I asked if the drugs couldn’t be administered orally and they said no. Apparently in a bid to offer me comfort, the matron said ‘he’s a baby, and with babies, getting a vein is trial and error.’ WHAT??? TRIAL AND ERROR???

Meanwhile the Paediatrician had come in, all dressed up to the nines in her Sunday Best. I thought, ah Thank God, someone with more experience. She didn’t even look at Raymond once, possibly because he would upset her planned schedule. I overheard the Matron tell her that there was an emergency with a severely dehydrated baby and was shocked to my very core to hear her say she was leaving by 10:30 sharp and was only doing discharges that morning. How could I even approach such a callous person without my smouldering displeasure erupting into full blown violence? So I told her my son was dying and I let her be. She obviously put it down to the histrionics of a parent’s pain-altered mind as she did not so much as say a word in reply. She actually left the building at 10:30 sharp. She never came to our room.

After torturing Raymond for an hour they gave up and brought him back to us and said we should start him on ORT. They gave us a bottle and said we should collect his stool the next time he stooled. The next time? What about all the diapers we had taken off? Couldn’t they analyse that? Apparently not.

Well, we continued the ORT and were barely 15 minutes in when Raymond started to throw up. We rushed to the matron to report and she said ‘burp him.’ She didn’t even look up from what she was doing. A child who is severely dehydrated, losing weight by the hour, is now throwing up his ORT and all you can say is ‘burp him?’ I suddenly understood, in a detached sort of way, how it could make sense to carry a shotgun into an establishment and shoot everybody there.

The final straw was when the student doctor came to clerk us. We told him we were giving Raymond Nospamin but had recently changed to Dentinox. He was non-plussed. He didn’t know the leading drug for Colic Ache; he didn’t even appear to know what Colic Ache was. At that point we decided it was enough and asked to be discharged.

They then decided to produce oral versions of the drugs they had wanted to administer intravenously. I went berserk I thought I had asked if these drugs could be administered orally and they had said no? So the hour long torture of my 5 week old son was really quite needless? My mother in-law who had now arrived had to calm me down and urged me to make haste for a better hospital.


Please can Duro Soleye Hospital change its approach to health care delivery before they do some irreparable damage?