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Access to health facilities poor in Pakistan-administered Kashmir

A visiting team of French medical personnel on an intensive five-day humanitarian tour of Pakistan-administered Kashmir, found that while local surgeons and doctors were competent, access to health care was not up to the mark, the head of the mission told a press conference in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, on Thursday. “I was satisfied with the local surgeons we worked with, but discovered that access to health care was not very good, possibly because of the difficult, hilly terrain,” Dr Bernard Debre, a former French minister for international development, who headed the team, told IRIN. The team of 25 doctors, surgeons and nurses, along with five media representatives, worked hand-in-surgical-glove with local medical staff in the northern city of Muzaffarabad, focusing primarily on women’s reproductive health issues and children. They operated in tandem with their Pakistani colleagues, on about 35 patients – out of a total of 80 patients lined up for treatment – in their short stay in the capital of Pakistan-administered Kashmir. The mission also found that there was increased awareness about women’s health cases, as compared to the past and his team broke new ground as they operated upon women with reproductive health issues, Debre said. “There are social constraints everywhere about women’s reproductive health; even in France, what to say about Azad Kashmir [Pakistan-administered Kashmir]: and, in seeing male doctors from our team operate on women with such problems, we managed to break a taboo,” Debre stressed. Some cases involved patients suffering from peritonitis, which occurs when the membrane lining the abdomen and covering the abdominal organs becomes inflamed. Their lives were saved when the visiting doctors operated on them, following an apparent reluctance of local surgeons earlier to engage in what was a complicated surgical procedure, Debre said. “There were three or four cases of peritonitis that we operated upon, including a two-year-old boy and a 20-year-old girl, whose lives were saved because the surgery was undertaken just in time,” Debre said, speaking in halting English before lapsing into fluent French and asking the resident representative of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) in Pakistan, Dr. Olivier Brasseur, who sat alongside, to translate. The humanitarian mission was sponsored in part by the UNFPA, which provided logistical support and focused on human-resource capacity-building, Brasseur told IRIN. Other sponsors included Pakistan’s national airline, which facilitated the tour by presenting a special package to what Islamabad refers to as Azad Jammu and Kashmir, the Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK) government, as well as the Pakistan army, in whose hospital the operations were conducted. Debre paid tribute to the AJK government, saying that it had worked towards upgrading the facilities he had visited on a previous tour six months ago. “The AJK government has been proactive in ensuring that basics such as operation theatres, tables, anesthetics and other medical facilities are up to standard. They weren’t as good on my last visit here, but, in a very short time, they had ensured that these facilities were upgraded,” Debre said. A press statement detailing the mission’s tour of the beautiful Himalayan region said the team had brought more than four mt of medicines and equipment, all free of charge, and that a follow-up to the mission would be a “twinning” programme between medical institutions in AJK and a Paris-based aid programme.

This article was produced by IRIN News while it was part of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Please send queries on copyright or liability to the UN. For more information: https://shop.un.org/rights-permissions

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