Eritrean woman lies with her baby just after having a caesarian section at Mendefera Hospital, 86 km (53 miles) south of the capital, Asmara.
REUTERS ALERTNET/Jack Kimball
FEATURE-Regional hospitals offer Eritreans better life
By Jack Kimball
MENDEFERA, Eritrea (Reuters AlertNet) - Helen Yohannes lies
beneath blankets, one hand with an intravenous drip attached dangling off
the hospital bed. She moves her free hand to pull back the white
mantle covering her new-born daughter.
"They told me I had three babies. Two died, but the baby
girl was alive," she said from her bed in Mendefera, 86 km (53
miles) south of the Eritrean capital.
Yohannes, who lives in a remote village outside the city,
would have died had it not been for a newly built regional
hospital. Two of the triplets had begun to infect her womb.
"They told me in my village that we cannot do it here, your
kidney is in a bad condition and your body is overly swollen,
you have to go to Mendefera," the 20-year-old said.
Some 630 women in this tiny east African country on the Red Sea coast die in childbirth for every 100,000, according to the U.N. Development Programme.
Trying to provide greater access to specialised health care,
Eritrea has opened four new regional hospitals since early 2006.
"People are coming from distant places. Many cases were
going to Asmara before, but now we are solving them here,"
hospital head doctor Berhe Habtezghe said.
The red-brick hospital, finished in April this year
with money from the World Bank, lies on the outskirts of
Mendefera, the regional capital of Debub.
Walking through the white-walled corridors, Berhe said it received 200 to 250 patients a day, serving about 500,000 people in the region.
"This has a great impact on the health of our people," the
Ukraine-educated doctor said.
BABY DEATHS
Nebait Mihret Asresu moves languidly, pulling her I.V. stand
through the bright, clean hallways.
"We travelled hours to get here, but I don't exactly
remember when I arrived, because I was having the delivery
illness," said Nebait, 38, wearing a pink gown and headscarf.
"This was my fifth time to lose the birth," she said,
surrounded by new mothers in a country where the U.N. children's fund, UNICEF, says 50 babies die for every 1,000 born alive.
In the last 15 years, Eritrea says it's dramatically cut its doctor to patient ratio and opened about 230 new clinics across the tiny nation. It's added 2,200 hospital beds, according to the
Ministry of Health.
Eritrea says regional hospitals are part of its post-independence goal to provide sophisticated medical services across the whole country.
Asmara is just about slap bang in the middle of Eritrea, which is slightly larger than Portugal and has a population of some 4.6 million.
Asmara gained independence in 1993 after a 30-year struggle
against neighbouring Ethiopia in which hundreds of thousands
died from conflict, famine and disease.
The Red Sea state has opened referral hospitals in the
regional capitals of Barentu, Mendefera, Assab and Ghinda this
year - costing around $33 million. Before most patients had to make the trek to Asmara if they needed to see a specialist.
Berhane Debru, the Health Ministry's director of medical services, said the government was trying to boost its regional health services so people wouldn't have to make the long journey to the capital.
"At the time of liberation, we inherited a health care
system which was inadequate in terms of physical facilities,
trained personnel and other health care systems," he said.
Eritrea's doctor to patient ratio has gone down since
independence from one doctor for every 37,500 people to one per
16,000, according to the Ministry.
Berhane said the ratio was expected to decrease further after graduation of the first set of students from Eritrea's only medical school, opened in 2003.
In the x-ray room at Mendefera hospital, a five-year-old boy
groans under the doctor's light touch. Shrapnel wounds from a
land mine cover his small body.
Examining the boy's bandaged arm, Berhe said: "If you don't
have the basic needs of the people, how can you grow?"
