By Adedotun Aderoboye

Failure to carryout accurate diagnosis  before commencing treatment on patients have been identified as a major factor leading to the mismanagement of people’s health across the country.

This was made known by a medical doctor at the Ondo State University of Medical Sciences Teaching Hospital, Ondo, Dr. Timothy Olagbe in a chat with The Hope.

According to him, “wrong diagnosis is a failure to establish an accurate and timely explanation of a patients’ health problem or communicate that explanation to the patient in the best language the patient will understand. These are diagnosis that are delayed, wrong or mixed all together.”

Olagbe stated that misinterpretation of patients’ physical conditions, lack of expertise, fatigue, work overload, physical and psychological distractions were capable of leading medical personnels into making wrong diagnosis.

He said “when a patient comes and present some clinical conditions that look exactly like other conditions, failure to perform certain tests to actually pin down those symptoms and signs to a certain disease condition could lead to wrong diagnosis.”

“Failure to also train personnels such as nurses in recognising and attending to patients could also cause misdiagnosis.”

Olagbe advised medical authorities and personnels to continue taking steps to improve the accuracy and timelines of medical diagnosis because it will go a long way in helping to reduce the damaging costs of inappropriate testing, wrong treatment and also help to maintain people’s health accurately.

He also added that ,”we should try to reduce the workload on doctors so that their brains can be refreshed to attend to patients.”

“According to WHO standard, it is one doctor to ten patients but we have not been able to achieve that in Nigeria presently. If we can strive hard to achieve WHO standard, it will go a long way to curb the menace and dangers of wrong diagnosis.”