A health centre in a rural part of Morobe Province is facing the challenges of power outage and shortage of medical drugs.
A community health worker at the Situm Health Center in the Nawaeb District, who wished to remain anonymous, stated that there was no power at the health center and the workers use other light sources to attend to pregnant mothers and the sick patients at night.
“Power is a big issue as there is some problem with the power connections to the health center, so we use solar lights and battery torches to help us.”
“When there is continuous down pour, our solar lights are insufficiently powered because of the lack of sunlight, and we use battery torches to attend to pregnant mothers giving birth and emergency cases that come.”
The Health center is also facing a shortage of vital medical drugs with patients given prescriptions and advised to make the 20km trip to Lae city to purchase medicine.
“We’ve run out of major drugs like Amoxicillin and Panadol that most of our patients need so we write prescriptions and send them to the pharmacies to purchase medicines.”
A majority of these cases according to the health worker are cold and flu cases, leading them to believe that there could be an outbreak because of the cold and rainy weather conditions.
“We have this viral infection that is happening and most of the cases we have been receiving are showing symptoms of cold and flu such as running nose, watery eyes, fever and sneezing because of the climate.”
Malaria cases are also common and because of poor sanitation and hygiene, diarrhea cases are on the rise as well.
Meanwhile, community health workers at the Situm Health Center receive up to 70 -80 patients per day and among these cases, pregnancy and childbirth are serious cases as the health center does not have the sufficient amounts of fluids that are used to help treat the mothers after childbirth.
Serious cases at the health center are referred to the Angau Memorial Hospital in Lae city.