Dr. (Mrs.) F. Eke joined the department in 1985 and assumed headship of the Department until 1986. Thereafter, Dr. R. S. Oruamabo became the head. During this period, some staff of the General Hospital worked in collaboration with the department and these included Drs. C. T. Wari-Toby, Ogunkunle, and Arora, although the last two left. Some visiting lecturers also contributed their quota.
For adequate training of the medical students and residents, the following facilities were established in the hospital.
- Children’s Emergency Ward (CHEW)
- Children’s Medical Wards which operates two wards each with a capacity of 48 beds with the possibility of horizontal expansion.
- Special Care Baby Unit and Newborn Intensive Care Unit: This is made up of two inborn and one outborn wards.
- Clinics: There are General Outpatients’ clinic and Consultants’ clinics. Today, we run specialty clinics like Neonatology, Nephrology, Endocrinology, Haemoatology, Oncology and Palliative, Neurology, Cardiology, Community Paediatrics, Infectious Disease, and Adolescent clinic
The Department relocated to its 2-storey building permanent block in 2010. This block has the children emergency ward (CHEW), children outpatient (CHOP), clinic, consultant paediatric clinic (CPC), diarrhoea and respiratory training unit, side laboratory and a satellite pharmacy on the ground floor.
Staff Strength
The Department which started off with only 2 lecturers has through its activities and capacity building increased its staff strength to 20 with the following cadres: nine (9) Professors, twelve (12) Senior lecturers. Apart from three Professors, the other members of staff started and finished their residency programmes at the UPTH and were subsequently employed by the University for the Department. Prof. R. S. Oruamabo retired in 2007 and Prof. F Eke in 2017.
