TITLE

Back to basics amid the ruins

AUTHOR(S)

Cook, Judith

PUB. DATE

April 2003

SOURCE

GP: General Practitioner;4/28/2003, p74

SOURCE TYPE

Periodical

DOC. TYPE

Article

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the author's experience (who is general practitioner in Great Britain) when he was asked whether he would consider a post in Post Taliban Afghanistan for four months, helping in the rehabilitation of a small hospital in Chaghcharan, Ghor province. Author has helped homeless people, refugees and asylum seekers, and people who are drug dependent.By the time he arrived, in February 2002, the Taliban regime had been removed but the lot of the local people was not immediately improved. The one small hospital in the province is at Chaghcharan. Its buildings were in disrepair, it had no water or electricity, its sewage system had broken down and its only medicines were donations from UNICEF. Its staff had not been paid since the fall of the Taliban. The most distressing aspect was seeing patients who almost certainly had TB but whom the medical staff were unable to treat. Sometimes there were children with obvious Pott's disease. Precise diagnosis was impossible because they had no laboratory and there was no quality control for the little basic lab in the bazaar. Treatment was not possible because the hospital had noanti-TB drugs and there was no programme for treating TB.

ACCESSION #

9860595

Tags: PHYSICIANS (General practice);  PRAGMATISM;  HEALTH services administration

 

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