Walter Wilson Nana
Buea, Cameroon
Medical Doctors in the Southwest Region have some impediments in their practice but they are not discouraged in their mission to improve the quality of health service delivery to Cameroonians.
At a Regional Coordination Meeting for the first quarter in 2014 that took place in Buea, Dr. Victor Mbome Njie, Southwest Regional Delegate of Public Health, his closed collaborators, the 18 District Medical Officers, DMOs and other health stakeholders in Region took a commitment to surmount their challenges and move on to work closer with the Traditional Birth Attendants making inroads in the health sector across the Region.
A cross section of medical practitioners at the First Quarter Coordination Meeting for 2014
According to Dr. Mbome Njie, they have some challenges covering deliveries, catching the number of assisted deliveries in the Region, maternal mortality is on the rise, like across the country, but in the Southwest Region, they are making a lot of efforts to stand up to the challenges. “We have difficulties accessing some districts because of absence of communication technology and poor road facilities in areas like Akwaya, Bakassi and Mundemba. We have Traditional Birth Attendants in the field who are doing lots of deliveries but they are not assisted,” he mentioned.
The Southwest Regional Health boss will concur that Mutual Health Schemes in the Region are problematic. “Mutual Health benefit rate is still below 10%. We are working with GIZ, the German Cooperation Department to give us their findings on the good practices from the Kumbo Mutual Health Scheme thathas recorded significant gains and it is already sustainable. GIZ is carrying out some studies out there in Kumbo and we look forward to see what we can learn from them, which can be useful in the Southwest Region,” he said.
Dr. Mbome Njie indicated that a lot still has to be done in terms of health education. “People must be schooled, we still have the challenge of people changing attitudes, people are still to come to terms with the fact that we can prevent losing someone in the family with just an expenditure of FCFA 4,000 to get enrolled in the Mutual Health Fund. But if you look at what it takes to bury an individual in the family, we spend huge sums of money organising funeral and burials.” He will add; “It is a national problem, we must sit together and source for ideas on how to better educate our population that we can spend less in taking care of our health than what it takes to bury the person. At the national level, we should begin a deep reflection on how to source for alternative funding for healthcare delivery.”
Despite the challenges on the ground, Dr Mbome Njie was upbeat, noting that they are sticking to the road map put in place by Cameroon’s Ministry of Public Health. “We are collecting data from the field, reporting to hierarchy what is happening on the ground and from our last quarter reports, we are performing well on the various vaccination campaigns. A performance, which has gone beyond the expectations from the national level.”
He saw the challenges on the field as a motivation to work harder, saying “the little gains we make, each time we sit together, gives us some satisfaction. We are not giving up because we have the responsibility to improve on the health of our population and it is our mission to always do it. Prevention is better than cure. We still spend big sums of money burying the dead and spend little preventing death.”
He invited the DMOs to go back to their areas of operations and do a census of all the Traditional Birth Attendants. “We have to work with them. Once we can identify them, we can work hand-in-glove, encourage them, school them so that we can be able to know what is happening. That will help us with the challenge to reduce maternal mortality.”
Data Specialist at the Southwest Regional Delegation of Public Health, Alain Ebah expressed difficulties on the acquisition of health data across the Region, while enjoining the DMOs to be creative in their quest to get data. “A credible data on the issue of Traditional Birth Attendants will help shape policy at the national level,” he said.
Presenting an overview of a proposal for Mutual Health Scheme for staff in the Ministry of Public Health, Samuel Monono of the Southwest Regional Delegation of Public Health indicated that priority should be for healthcare and not death as prescribed by the scheme sent from the Ministry of Public Health in Yaoundé.
Dr. Bernard Atembeh Bedifeh, Southwest Regional Chief for Immunisation makes a contribution at the Regional Coordination Meeting
Some of the District Medical Doctors at the Coordination Meeting in Buea
