The main obstacles we are facing is that the needs are huge, and our capacity is limited, same as for other actors. For the population, the situation was not great to begin with, even before the floods. There was an ongoing economic crisis that was hitting Pakistan, mostly vulnerable populations like the poor and the Afghan refugees. With the floods, many people lost literally everything.
Now one of the challenges is that we are receiving the cases in advanced stage: during emergencies, even the health seeking behavior in the communities changed. For example, parents don’t bring their child in at the beginning of an illness, like in the first days of a fever. They wait. Not because they are bad parents but because they have other priorities: “Where can we get our next meal? Where can we sleep tonight? What can we do to restore our lives?”. Consequently, we receive children in bad conditions.
So in general, we have logistic challenges and infrastructural challenges in the health facilities, but we are improving that and we are working on it with the government hand by hand. We need to rehabilitate the health structures to make them an environment to provide not only health care but also health education in the waiting area, to do the triage and make sure we don’t miss the more critical cases.
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