A senior consultant physician, Dr Ibrahim, has died after collapsing shortly after arriving at Arewa Surgery Hospital in Hotoro, Kano State, to attend to patients who had waited several hours for his clinic.
The incident occurred on Saturday evening. Witnesses said the doctor collapsed minutes after stepping out of his vehicle and was rushed to the hospital’s emergency unit by colleagues.
According to Suleiman Harbo, an aide to the Jigawa State Governor, Dr Ibrahim had agreed to stand in for another consultant who was unavailable.
Harbo, who had accompanied his elderly mother to the hospital at about 5 p.m., said about six patients, most of them over 80 years old, had been waiting to see the doctor.
Harbo said hospital staff contacted Dr Ibrahim, who told them he would come after observing the Maghrib prayer.
He arrived shortly afterwards but reportedly became dizzy immediately after stepping out of his vehicle. Fellow doctors rushed him into the emergency unit, where efforts to revive him were unsuccessful.
“Within 15 minutes, he was confirmed dead,” Harbo wrote in a post shared on social media.
Describing the scene as heartbreaking, Harbo said the elderly patients waiting to be treated watched as several senior consultant physicians struggled to save one of their own.
“The painful irony was this: all the patients waiting to see him were above 80 years of age, while about five senior consultant doctors fought to save him, yet all of them broke down in tears,” he wrote.
Witnesses said Dr Ibrahim’s last audible words were, “La ilaha illallah.”
Harbo also recalled that when his mother was informed that the doctor they had been waiting to see had died, she responded: “Innalillahi wa inna ilaihi raji’un. May Allah have mercy on him. Let us just go home. I am already healed.”
