Afghanistan Times
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KABUL: Against the backdrop of high mother mortality rate, a recent health survey has showed some shocking findings regarding the provision of health services, revealing that merely 14 percent of health centers across the country provided essential services.
These basic services include providing the necessary child care, supervision over their growth, family planning, prenatal and delivery care, and sexually transmitted infections-related services.
Conducted by the Ministry of Public Health (MoPH) in seven provinces, more than 1,000 health workers have been interviewed as part of the survey.
MoPH has also evaluated 142 health centers based on the services they provided and the quality of the health care delivered.
Staggeringly, the survey report found that about 60 percent of consultations about perils of pregnancy provided to pregnant women were inaccurate.
According to the survey, about 75 percent of health centers provided prenatal services to pregnant women; however, the services aimed at informing women about pregnancy complications weren’t correct.
On the other hand, services for normal and natural births were available in 81 percent of health centers and about 75 percent of health centers were well-equipped to deal with complex births and cesarean sections.
These findings come as maternal mortality rate has gone up as some reports recently revealed that at least 143 mothers lost their lives in every 100,000 births in the country.
Based on the poll, more than half of the health centers didn’t have scales for weighing new-born children and about 75 percent of them didn’t have internet facility.
This comes as 3,500 hospitals and health centers are functioning across the country while according to MoPH, at least 90 percent Afghans can access these health centers within two hours.
