Ziba Balkhi
Lack of access to healthcare services in the districts of Balkh province is forcing women to take long distance journeys for maternity illnesses and emergencies.
The journey to Mazar-e-Sharif’s Abu Ali Sina Balkhi regional hospital often comes with complications and health risks along the way. Soman, a 13-year-old teenage girl, said her mother nearly died due to excessive bleeding on the way to the hospital from Dehdadi district.
Soman said the medical center in Dehdadi told the family that they wouldn’t be able to hospitalize and operate on her mother.
“My mother had miscarriage, and now she is undergoing curettage surgery,” she said, waiting in the hallway to hear about her mother’s surgery, anxiously. She added that their local medical center “turned my mother away, saying she had become very weak due to excessive bleeding.”
Several women from different Balkh districts, who were hospitalized in the maternity ward of Abu Ali Sina Balkhi hospital in Mazar-e-Sharif, also complained about lack of medical services in their communities.
Afghanistan’s healthcare system, which heavily depended on foreign aid, is on the verge of a complete collapse due to the lack of funding after the Taliban takeover.
Doctors haven’t been paid for months, and hospitals have run out of medicine across the country. The International Rescue Committee (IRC) predicted in a report in January that 90 percent of clinics could shut down amid the economic crisis in Afghanistan.
A crumbling healthcare system is harming the entire population. But women and children may be affected disproportionately as local clinics which provided services to them are no longer capable of accepting patients.
This is exactly what is happening in Balkh province where most maternity clinics are turning away patients because they can’t provide the required health services anymore.
Bibi Gul, 38, said her husband brought her to Mazar-e-Sharif hospital because he was afraid their local clinic in Dawlat Abad district may not be able to carry out curettage surgery to stop the excessive bleeding she was suffering from.
Sayed Arif, a resident of Dawlat Abad district who brought his wife to Abu Ali Sina hospital, said that people’s access, especially women’s, to health services is limited in all districts of Balkh province, that’s why he has come from far away to Mazar-e-Sharif for the treatment of his wife.
“There is no clinic in our village,” he said.
Maryam, Arif’s wife, said there is one operational clinic in a neighboring village but it only accepts patients for one hour everyday, from 11 a.m. to 12. “After that, they do not accept patients, even if they are delivering babies,” she said.
Maryam said one of her relatives died after she gave birth at home last year in Dawlat Abad. She said the mother was taken to a local clinic when the bleeding didn’t stop after she gave birth. But she was told to go to Mazar-e-Sharif hospital. By the time the impoverished family procured money to pay for the taxi fare, it was too late.
“The child survived, but the mother died,” Maryam said.
Over 1,600 Afghans mothers died for every 100,000 live births in 2001. That number dropped to 640 deaths per 100,000 by 2018, a significant decrease but still one of highest mortality rates in the world, according to a VOA report published in March.
Nearly one year after the Taliban’s return to power for the second time, many fear the rate of maternal mortality may have increased to the level it was in 2001 during their first rule.
Zahra Ahmdabadi Hamnawa, specialist trainer and head of the maternity ward at Abu Ali Sina Balkhi hospital, said local clinics in Balkh districts are under-equipped, and under-staffed and that is why they are turning patients away.
“We have a standard delivery room and we have strong personnel and facilities like a blood bank, oxygen, emergency room, and necessary medicines, and we have a well-equipped laboratory to solve people’s problems,” she said. “These facilities are not available in the districts” hospitals.
Anahita Amin, a health specialist in Mazar-e-sharif city, said lack of access to health services for women could be catastrophic and a death sentence for many of them. She added if women can’t get to the hospital on time for the delivery, it could lead to the “death of the child or the mother.”
