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April 01, 2008

More attention to be given

Despite the curfew announced on Thursday for two days and then prolonged it till further notice, I decided to go to work on Saturday as I fed up of being away of my job and being stuck at home for six days ,three days before the government's announcement of the curfew. As you know Amil neighborhood, the place where I live with some other neighborhoods in Baghdad and even some governorates in Iraq where the Sadrists have the upper hand in, had a strike started on Monday afternoon till Thursday the day when the curfew had been announced after the clashes which broke out in these areas. Thus, since last Monday we have been suffering from the clashes between the Mahdi army and the Iraqi forces backed by the American and British forces with the lack of power supply, drinking water, gasoline, propane gas, food and medical treatment! During the strike started on Monday Sadrists ordered shop owners to close all shops without any consideration fop people; therefore, we had the shortage of food even before the curfew started.

This is not the point I want to focus on as my colleague mentioned that in the previous blog . The point I want to mention is the medical treatment during the curfew due to the two cases I witnessed. The first one was of my Mom who had an operation to be done on Tuesday morning .We were lucky to have the doctor in hospital to make the operation, but the unlucky thing was that she stayed in hospital for the three day curfew alone as we couldn't leave out house in western Baghdad to reach the hospital in eastern Baghdad. She was really in need for one of her family member with her or a nurse to take care of her ,but even nurses weren't available at that time as most of them are from Sadr city!
  As you know Sadr city is in a siege since Friday and before that it witnessed the same strike we had in my neighborhood. So all the employees from Sadr city were forced to stay home by the strike first and the curfew later which is still on their neighborhood left this hospital and others in chaos. The second case was in my neighborhood for a kid who had a broken hand and his father suffered a lot to reach the Yarmouk hospital and when they reached there was only a resident doctor who treated the child ,but he wasn't qualified enough to deal with that case . He put the cast over the broken wrist and the child went home, but the latter couldn't sleep day and night for four days due to the pain he had from his hand .When the child's father took his kid again to Yarmouk hospital on Sunday, when the curfew is lifted in most Baghdad's neighborhoods, another doctor treated him and he said that the first doctor didn't put the broken bone in its position and the cast didn't cover half of the fraction.
Those two cases revealed the disaster and the chaos that the hospitals and the health system in Iraq pass through. In Iraq , we have buildings which are called hospitals, but what about the doctors, nurses, medicine and the other medical equipments which are needed to call these buildings hospitals. Most of the Iraqi doctors are out of Iraq due the security situation, the other medical staff lack the experience due to the lack of doctors and the shortage of training, the medicine we have in hospitals are so bad from bad origin and the last disaster is the lack of the needed equipments in hospitals and sometimes they are available but the hospitals don't have the efficient staff to operate them. I hope that the government takes great attention to health as much as they for their parties and the pavements which are replaced twice a year in some spots to make certain contractors be billionaires in a record time.            

Posted at 10:38 AM |

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"Inside Iraq" is a blog updated by Iraqi journalists working for McClatchy Newspapers. They are based in Baghdad and outlying provinces. These are firsthand accounts of their experiences. Their complete names are withheld for security purposes.

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