A point of view

Every minute counts

Barbara Kruspan

Country Director Mozambique An ambulance rushes to a road traffic accident with its blue lights flashing and siren wailing. A team of qualified healthcare professionals is on hand in the accident and emergency department with an adequate supply of personal protective equipment (PPE), blood reserves and medicines – as well as a reliable power supply. We know that rapid treatment in an emergency can mean the difference between life and death.

In the rural and sometimes hard-toreach areas of northern Mozambique, a situation like the one described above is wishful thinking. I remember a situation involving a young mother that really touched me and that continues to spur me on to continue my work for SolidarMed in these regions. The young mother had given birth prematurely to two tiny baby girls in a very remote village. As she was delirious, she was put on a motorbike, wedged between the driver and another person to prop her up, and taken to the nearest health centre in Meloco, which was still quite far away. But due to a lack of treatment options, they couldn’t help her there. So first the two newborns were collected from the village and then all three were transported on the loading platform of a pickup truck in blazing sun and on bumpy roads to the health centre in the district capital of Namuno, over an hour away, where they diagnosed eclampsia and malaria. Because the health centre in Namuno was unable to provide the urgent medical assistance to the young mother and her newborns, they were subsequently taken on another twohour journey by ambulance, also on bad roads, to the hospital in Montepuez. Despite all the efforts, the mother and both babies very sadly died there. The situation described above is not an isolated case and highlights the enormous difficulties for people in northern Mozambique to access healthcare services. To ensure that patients can reach a hospital as quickly and conveniently as possible, SolidarMed has been running a project since 2017 involving ambulance taxis, which has already delivered good results in the Chiúre District. But it is not only the unmade roads, the extremely long distances and a lack of resources that can be deadly in an emergency. Another obstacle is a lack of knowledge as patients and their families in village communities are often unaware of the urgency and fail to seek help early enough. When they arrive at health centres, the patients that need help most urgently are often not identified as emergencies in time. And in some cases healthcare workers are not sufficiently trained to recognise the urgency and initiate the appropriate treatment.

We are working to resolve this with our ‘survive and thrive’ project, which you can read more about on pages 4-7. SolidarMed is confident that it will save lives.

Thank you so much for your valuable support, without which our work wouldn’t be possible. ■