Where medical assistance is effective

At the relief camp in Layyah, doctors are present throughout the day and a pharmacist is on 24-hour duty.

KOT SULTAN: Kalsoom Akhtar is among the millions who were displaced after her village was flooded, but that does not prevent her from being a health worker in a relief camp set up in a school in the Layyah district town of Kot Sultan.  Regarding women survivors, Akhtar, who puts in a six to eight-hour shift, said “It helps that they have a woman to talk to. They are more open to advice and they listen to what you’re saying, they try to follow it”.

Unlike many other relief camps, medical assistance at this camp is effective.  Doctors are present throughout the day and a pharmacist is on 24-hour duty. On average, 300 people visit the doctors every day, and a total of 6,700 people have been treated since it was set up in late July. This includes residents of Kot Sultan.

Children, sitting in their mother’s laps, are covered with heat rashes or scabies. Many of the conditions the medical staff is dealing with are pre-existent, exacerbated because of the floods. According to Akhtar, women in the camp are severely malnourished, and the trauma of escaping the floods and being displaced is aggravating their condition. Several women told The Express Tribune that they had severe headaches that would not go away, despite taking medication.

“The most common problems here are respiratory tract infections, diarrhoea and skin diseases,” said Dr Faisal Raza, an on-duty health worker at the camp. “We have supplied the people in the camp with hygiene kits and educated them on how to use it. We are also trying to educate the children about basic hygiene; that they have to wash their hands before and after they leave a bathroom and so on”, he said.  But the education is rendered ineffective because the rooms these children live in are overcrowded, dirty and badly ventilated. “These women know how to keep their homes clean … but they can’t do anything here in such conditions,” Akhtar says.

The camp, which is run by the government, has a stock of medicines being supplied by the Executive District Officer Health and non-governmental organisations. More notably, the camp also has female health workers at the site who can attend to women.

Two women also gave birth in the camp and had normal deliveries, according to Raza.

Medical assistance in the flood-hit areas is trickling in. While several doctors, both male and female, have visited areas where people have not evacuated their homes, and are also present at organised relief camps, the numbers are still not enough to treat those in urgent need of medical care. Foreign organisations such as Doctors Without Borders and United Nations agencies are also working in the province, but the infrastructure required to provide assistance is missing. In areas where there are no camps, doctors are only able to conduct short field visits. Hospitals that have been reopened are struggling with the influx of patients as people return to their homes, and in many areas hospitals are still inundated with water. As cases of diseases such as cholera start being reported - there are at least six in Kot Addu – people like Akhtar will find themselves overburdened with patients.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 26^th, 2010.