Medical Care in Africa

Many people in the USA agree that our healthcare system is messed up. But, regardless of its negative aspects, give me an American hospital any day of the week, even if I have to pay my life savings for care. Rather your life savings than your life. 

Over the last year I have had the opportunity to visit hospitals and primary health care facilities in Kenya, South Sudan, and now Liberia. Most of them have consisted of concrete rooms stuffed with beds and benches outside where people sit or lie or sleep as they wait to be treated. Pharmacies are disordered and drugs have likely not been stored in the proper manner or temperature. Often there are no actual doctors (maybe a couple if it is a hospital) and there are just Nurses, Midwives and Clinical Officers. Overall they seemed like pretty miserable places to be in, let alone be sick in. But they are still a bazillion times better than having nowhere to go and no one to help you if you need help. Sometimes people have to walk or travel for days to even get to a clinic, that’s how few and far between they are. And there are rarely emergency services to come to your rescue if you are hurt. Sometimes there might be 1 ambulance in an entire district for 60,000 people.

An ambulance I saw in Liberia. Might not be so great...but anything is better than nothing at all.

The maternity ward at the hospital at the refugee camp in Dadaab, Kenya had some delivery rooms and then one large recovery room with maybe 50 beds in it with women and their babies lying around, most under some sort of mosquito net. It was about as different as you could possibly get from the nice, private delivery and recovery rooms you’d find in the USA.  But it is also a huge step up from having no hospital at all and giving birth in your small hut or UN provided tent in the camp. Sadly I don’t have pictures of it as I didn’t think it was appropriate to take photos while I was there.

One of the primary health care centers in Aweil Town in South Sudan was going to start doing deliveries instead of referring them to the nearest hospital. Below is a picture of the “delivery room”.

Exam room...soon to be delivery room.

I visited the “pediatrics ward” at a Primary Health Care Center in Panthou, South Sudan. It consisted of a concrete structure full of beds pushed up against each other and lots of mammas and their kids lying about.

Pediatrics Unit in South Sudan

In Liberia, the official figures state that there are 51 trained Liberian doctors…in a country of 3.5 million people! We help run some hospitals and health care centers in conjunction with the Ministry of Health. We provide capacity building (training for the MOH administration staff), supplies for the hospital, some ambulances and sometimes doctors and midwives. I visited one hospital and it had some nicer, newer buildings that we built. Goats were running all about and goat droppings littered the ground.

"Waiting Room" at a Primary Health Care Center in Panthou, South Sudan

Yesterday I heard about a guy in the town I’m in who was recently pronounced dead and as they were preparing to bury him they realized he was breathing and still alive! I’ve actually heard of this happening once before! When I was in Uganda, we had a vehicle accident at our base in South Sudan. We choppered the injured parties to Kampala for medical care. One guy was severely injured and later pronounced dead at the hospital.  We were preparing to write our condolences and I asked one of his colleagues for the proper way to address the letter. That’s when I was told that as they were preparing to bury him, they discovered he was actually alive! I have no idea if he ultimately survived his injuries, but I like to think that he did. Otherwise I have nightmares.

Dispensing medicine to a sick child in South Sudan

It is sad to see the state of healthcare in developing countries and I feel proud to work for an organization that does such good work providing care to some of the world’s most vulnerable people in some of the world’s most austere places.  Our medical systems in the West might not be perfect, but I’m thankful for them and feel lucky and really grateful that if I get sick, I don’t have to walk for days to get treated.