Visiting Rabia Balkhi Maternity Hospital

Visiting Rabia Balkhi Maternity Hospital
A Conversation with Dr. Arafat, Assistant Director
by Le Anne Clausen

If I’ve grown up in an age where fathers finally do not wait outside the delivery rooms, imagine the impact of seeing seemingly hundreds of men lined up outside a hospital, waiting for their female relatives to emerge! I observed very few men inside apart from the hospital staff, which I surmise would create a more comfortable environment for women patients in the various rooms of an open-ward hospital.

The hospital’s departments include obstetrics and gynecology, dermatology, and internal medicine. They handle about 150 ob/gyn and 60-70 other patient consultations a day. Five or six Cesarean sections are performed each day, and perhaps five tubal ligations per week for mothers who don’t want more children. In a country ranked second highest in the world for women dying in childbirth, this can be a life-saving procedure. Family planning consultations, birth control, and IUDs also available.

The hospital is short of medication, anesthesia, and sutures, so the staff gives writes prescriptions ahead of time and sends the patients or their families to buy the supplies in the bazaar. There are several building problems in this older facility, including regular septic system breakdowns and variable electricity. They now have a generator and oil to fuel it donated by the International Medical Corps.

Dr. Arafat notes that among the patients seen at the hospital are often mothers who are malnourished or anemic. “They don’t eat enough good food,” she says, in a country where produce can be prohibitively expensive. In addition, new mothers are discharged after three hours if there are no presenting problems, because there is no room to house them in the facility. This can be quite difficult on women who have traveled from distant areas to receive care.

Patient mortality rates are quite high. Twenty-nine died after leaving the hospital due to complications. Death rates among the poor and villagers are much higher due to lack of access to healthcare. The hospital receives many patients in bad shape, she said, who are difficult to treat. Some die before admission, during the taking of vitals, sometimes arriving after receiving faulty operations elsewhere.

As a charity hospital, there is no charge to patient except transportation and prescriptions. According to the director, most of the funding comes from the Ministry of Health. Rabia Balkhi, the hospital’s namesake, was a tenth-century Afghan princess renowned for her poetry.