Another example of adaptive healthcare, Bridget Huber over at PRI:
More hereIn the maternity ward at the hospital in Chokwe, Mozambique, Nilza Munambo is the woman in charge.
credit Bridget Huber
"He latched on once," Munambo says. "He sucked one or two times and then stopped. Now he can't even do that."
It's an average day for any doctor — except Munambo isn't a doctor at all. She's part of a class of health workers that don't really exist in the US. They're called tecnicos, or technicians, and they perform almost almost all of the surgery in Mozambique. The country only has about 20 practicing surgeons for a population of some 26 million people.
After Mozambique won independence from Portugal in 1975, there was an exodus of doctors. Many were under contract with the colonial government and departed for Portugal. Others didn’t want to practice medicine under the new socialist government, which had abolished the private healthcare system.
The physician shortage only got worse when civil war broke out two years later, says Dr. Fernando Vaz, a former health minister who is now a professor at the Superior Institute of Health Sciences in Maputo.
The situation was "lamentable," especially in rural areas, Vaz says.
"People were dying of the simplest things," he says. "Miscarriages were killing women. People died if they got shot in the leg."
So Vaz, who is a surgeon, came up with what started out as a temporary solution: Train lower-level health workers to do lifesaving surgery — a tactic several other African countries have also adopted.
Vaz estimates that technicians who specialize in maternal health, pediatrics or general surgery now handle about 80 to 90 percent of the surgical health problems in rural areas. That includes Munambo, who does a lot of what an obstetrician would do...[continue reading]
