A University Teaching Hospital security Guard on Saturday night pepper sprayed patients from one of the male wards after he mistakenly thought that he was pepper spraying a patient care taker.
According to the security guard of the hospital in Zambia, he lamented that people have been refusing to leave the hospital and in his mind, pepper spraying them was a good strategy to chase them from the hospital to de-congest the wards.
“I was just trying to chase people away. These wards have been congested by people who are not sick. I was talking to another man who clearly told me that he has been in hospital taking care of his patient for a week and he had no plans of leaving the hospital. I tried to reason with him that other people with patients did not have a place and he needed to leave and he refused” he said before being apprehended by UTH staffs.
UTH sources informed Zambian Watch that one female nurse who was on duty was asthmatic and she almost lost her life. The nurse could not speak or breath for sometime as she was later rushed to oxygen by her fellow nurses.
“It’s a sad situation, we would have lost our patients and our colleague too. The security guard started pepper spraying patients with the view of wanting to chase people keeping eyes on these patients. According to him, he wanted to disburse those people to create room for other patients, but in the process ended up pepper spraying patients” a source said.
“We have not recorded any death as the result of that, but we almost lost our colleague. She is asthimatic. Despite the whole male ward being affected, her life was in danger, she could not breath or talk. We rushed her to the oxygen and after 30 minutes, she was a bit back to normal. But as I’m talking to you right now, she is fine and in good health” a source said.