By Obi Emekekwue
The excitement is always palpable each
time a mobile health unit pulls into one of Turkey's disaster stricken
communities. During a recent visit to a rural community badly affected
by the 1999 earthquakes, an elderly lady was so overcome with emotion after
receiving care from one of the on-board doctors that, without thinking,
she planted a kiss on the doctor's cheek and hugged her, all the time clutching
the boxes of vitamins she had just received.
"We are overwhelmed," said a doctor. "People are so pleased that we go to their neighbourhood in a medical health unit and actually provide services they need, rather than cut and dry advice."
"The project has been an enormous help to our province," agreed the provincial health director in Duzce province. "We are more confident in service delivery and the medical health units have eased the pressure on our directorate as we have limited means to cover the needs of everyone in the province."
The mobile health units were introduced with the support of the UNFPA under a project aimed at responding effectively to disasters and providing much-needed reproductive health services when static health units became inoperative.
Implemented with the assistance of the European Commission Humanitarian Office, the project, which has just been completed, assisted Turkey's health authorities to re-establish reproductive health services in earthquake hit provinces in the industrially developed Marmara region.
Operating with six ambulances modified and medically equipped to provide reproductive health services, the project provided safe delivery, gynaecological examinations, IUD insertion and counselling. Through the mobile health units, medical teams consisting of doctors and nurses, travelled to districts and villages where availability of reproductive health services is limited or non-existent and provided a range of services, including advice, referral and provision of information, education and communication materials.
A unique feature of the project is the provision of basic medicines, vitamin supplements and psycho-social support by NGOs to the frail and the elderly - a group that is often neglected during disasters. It also facilitated the establishment of good network among the NGOs, local municipalities and health officials, helping to develop a support system for the elderly.
An initial evaluation study revealed that contraceptive use has increased by as much as 300 per cent in some of the areas covered by the project. Demand for reproductive health services has also increased dramatically in most of the rural areas visited by the medical teams.
The Turkish Ministry of Health will now continue the services of the medical health units using its own resources.
For more information, please contact Ahmet Ozirmak, Officer-in-Charge, UNFPA Turkey. Tel; +90 312 426 01 88; E-mail: tur01ao@un.org.tr or Ozirmak@unfpa.org