Mathew is a doctor at the Mukonchi Health Clinic. I was fortunate to receive a tour of the clinic from him last Saturday. With one clinic to serve a population of 28 000, I could tell that he is a busy man.
The clinic is one of the best maintained buildings in all of Mukonchi—second only to Catholic Church and its parish. The infrastructure for other buildings especially the rural schools is in a dilapidated state. School benches are missing and the chalkboards can be impossible to read from a distance.
Since Zambia is one of the African countries most affected by HIV/AIDS I asked him how the clinic was managing the epidemic.
“For all those tested, less than 5% of people are now testing positively for HIV. That is less than the percentage testing positively in the past” he happily reported. The government announced last month the overall rate of infection in Zambia has declined from 17% to 14.5%.
The most common illness the clinic treats is malaria. Last year, there were hundreds of new cases every month with over 600 cases one month. If I understood him correctly, there weren’t any deaths from malaria and that was a surprise to me. I plan to go back to ask him if the clinic used to experience any malaria related deaths and what happened to produce the change.
Despite this positive impression I was getting, the clinic still faces challenges. “Sometimes there are some problems when we want to buy equipment or other things” Mathew admitted. “We don’t have a lot, but we are doing the best we can.”
Another challenge concerns education especially with community awareness to encourage behaviour changes. Meghan, a Canadian volunteer for Student Partnership Worldwide is working with her Zambian partner Rachel doing HIV/AIDS and sex education at the Mukonchi High School. “Some people just don’t want to wear condoms…It doesn’t help when people think that Jesus doesn’t want them to wear a condom either!” Meghan said laughing, though I sensed the frustration in her tone.
On the front of maternal health during and after birth, some women still don’t plan a supervised birth. In a conversation with a nurse at the clinic, she regretted to inform me that one woman died last week from a returned placenta during birth. She didn’t plan a trip to the clinic, gave birth at home and bled too much before she could be rushed to Kabwe hospital.
The situation is improving however as more and more women are coming weeks before they are expected to deliver. The clinic even has a guest house for them complete with an outdoor kitchen so they can cook their meals. On the other side of the clinic is an outdoor pavilion where mothers can bring their babies to be vaccinated every week. Last week there was a large crowd of over 50 mothers with their young babies waiting for them to be vaccinated.
I left sensing that the hard-working doctors and nurses at the clinic were making progress in Mukonchi improving people’s health. At the same time, when some people are more than 30km away from the clinic and have no means of transport, preventable deaths occur. Health emergencies that could be handled in an urban setting such as complications at birth remain a problem in rural areas.
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