Healthcare system not reducing mortality rate, report warns

Giving more free drugs and training to health centres in the Democratic Republic of Congo is not an adequate solution to the country’s worsening mortality rate, a United Nations aid agency mission has concluded. While the DRC’s “health system is little more than a conduit to feed health workers’ families”, the report said, “no amount of medical supplies, training, campaigns or co-ordination will increase access to health care, nor reduce avoidable mortality”. The mission from UNICEF and the World Health Organisation (WHO) recommended a new incentive system for health personnel, in which pay would be linked to delivering “a package which directly targets the main killers, both in the health centre and at household level”, as in the current door to door polio eradication drive. Currently, Congolese health workers provide individual curative health care for a fee, not preventive public health care, unless paid for by an externally supported project. The report recommended shifting health care from curative to preventive medicine, and focusing on the main killers: malaria, measles, epidemic and immunisable diseases, respiratory infections, diarrhoeal diseases and complications in pregnancy. The HIV/AIDS risk should be focused on in the education system and nutrition indicators should also be part of a health surveillance system. The report estimated that the minimum investment needed to reverse the current health trends amounted to US $350 million a year, of which US $50 million should go to producing essential health services. “If Congolese households are not aided to access the resources they need...the international community must be prepared to watch a humanitarian catastrophe sweep to an entirely predictable conclusion,” the report warned.