THE community clinics across the country lack logistic supports and it hampers the availability of cheap treatments at the grassroots level. So, experts suggest that the community level health facilities should be equipped with proper labour rooms, smooth supply of electricity and water and accommodation for midwives posted there to provide the locality with quality mother and child care. Speakers at a roundtable conference in the city said as reported in the print media on Wednesday.
The idea of the community clinics across the country, established by the government in 2009, was to bring health care to the doorstep of people. To a great extent, they did the job by contributing significantly to the improvement of the overall antenatal and postnatal care family planning and nutritional services, providing treatment for diarrhoea, pneumonia and other childhood infections and counselling on the consequences of early marriage. It is difficult to understand the logic behind setting up such people-friendly health complexes around the country and then not monitoring and following up their performances.
The government-run community clinics, which can notably improve healthcare services in rural areas, are beset with multiple problems like infrastructural weaknesses, insufficient or irregular supply of medicines, and negligence of caregivers. Insufficient medicine supply is the main problem of community clinics. It will be better for the public if the allocation of medicines is increased to assure quality health service. Although it is said that Bangladesh’s community clinics are a model to provide services to reduce maternal mortality and are an opportunity to reduce mother to child transmission of HIV as well, it is being hampered with no physicians, supportive staff and medicine, which have made this service a microcosm of the broken healthcare system of the country.
According to a report, some of them lack even basic amenities like electricity and water. So, due to lack of institutional supports, 11,000 community clinics across the country apparently fail to go to its prescribed goals of ensuring projected health care services at grassroots. To strengthen the community clinic services, the government had a plan to create a trust fund across the country to give those a permanent shape and ensure smooth medicare services for people. The plan was not applied through just an order being changed. In our view the existing infrastructure is good but they need further strengthening.
Their service windows must be capable to provide treatment for diseases as well as make the community members aware about the afflictions. Now, with the rising incidence of non-communicable diseases like diabetes, blood pressure and cancer in villages, health care seeking behaviour of the people is also changing. Given the importance of this extensive network of primary healthcare service, community clinics should receive due support with adequate funds and logistic supports.
