Health is a key development sector for the simple reason that all work depends on healthy people. But Cameroon has not given it the attention it deserves. Cameroon’s health infrastructure is decades behind.
Public officials appointed to move the health sector forward happen to be the very ones who drag it behind. They misappropriate huge sums of foreign aid money intended to fight endemic diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS.
These abuses leave the health ministry with out all the money they should have at their disposal. To get round the money problem health authorities are using cooperation agreements to fly in specialist doctors from abroad for a short stay during which they treat cases that would otherwise have been evacuated.
A group of Belgian heart surgeons is presently in Cameroon to operate upon some thirty heart patients. The arrangement is a boon to the ministry which would be spending only a tiny fraction of the hundreds of millions it would have had to in the case of evacuation to Belgium.
The arrangement also offers the opportunity for hands-on learning by Cameroonian doctors specialising in heart ailments.
We urge officials to multiply this beneficial initiative and extend it in other disease areas requiring specialist skills that are in short supply in Cameroon.
The Israelis, we are pleased to acknowledge, have been particularly helpful in this respect. They have often sponsored short trips to Cameroon of eye specialists who have proved very useful to the people.
This idea can also be adapted to help patients in rural towns and villages. Doctors in township hospitals could be programmed to undertake consultation in rural areas from time to time. That way, medical services go to needy and poor rural dwellers.
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