News Tigray’s post-conflict health system slowly recovering: MSF
August 17, 2024
A Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) report indicates that health infrastructure in the Tigray region is slowly recovering, with the organization’s efforts at rebuilding health centers in the town of Abiy Adi making good progress.
MSF was present in Abiy Adi, a town in central Tigray, at the beginning of the two-year war in late 2021, but its work there was suspended following an incident in June 2021, during which three of its volunteers, Tedros Gebremariam, Maria Hernandez Matas, and Yohannes Halefom, were brutally murdered.
The organization returned to Abiy Adi in March 2023, and a report released this week reveals that Abiy Adi General Hospital has recovered its capacity to treat patients and its healthcare provision has reached the appropriate standards. MSF says it is handing over activities at the Hospital and moving on to assess and support health centers in other areas.
“We started by supporting the emergency department, then paediatrics, then neonatal intensive care and maternity. This was at a time when the hospital didn’t even have gloves, and many people were dying due to lack of medical equipment,” said Mulugeta Abreha, a nursing team supervisor at MSF who worked in Abiy Adi.
Following the war, health facilities lacked medical supplies, biomedical equipment and health workers, many of whom were unpaid, according to the organization. The Abiy Adi General Hospital (AAGH) was left barely functional.
“We started providing health services in Abiy Adi district through mobile outreach clinics for the first time in March 2023. In April, we began supporting the hospital, which at the time was experiencing a high number of mass casualties that the hospital’s capacity could not handle. The hospital had only one doctor, and other staff were working without pay,” said Abreha.
MSF reports the Hospital’s emergency room received and treated more than 15,400 patients between March 2023 and July 2024, while its neonatal intensive care unit treated close to 900 newborns over the same period. The organization rehabilitated the laundry, waste zone and surgical and medical wards, and donated biomedical equipment.
MSF took part in a series of blood donation campaigns in collaboration with Axum Blood Bank during the reporting period in a bid to curb the shortage in blood reserves. The consequences of conflict in Tigray, but also in other regions of Ethiopia, left healthcare facilities barely functional, making the collection, processing and distribution of blood more difficult, according to MSF.
The supply of blood was exhausted due to a myriad of factors including a lack of donors and donation sites, a surge in cases of malaria driving up the occurrence of anaemia, and the prevalence of complications during birth as mothers are forced to travel longer distances in search of medical assistance.
A recently published report from the Ministry of Health reveals that well over 4.2 million cases of malaria were registered in the country between January and August this year, with the disease claiming at least 856 lives.
MSF says it will continue its work in the Tigray, Afar, Oromia, Amhara, Gambella, Southern, and Somali regions. MSF is an interventionist humanitarian organisation formed by a group of journalists and doctors to act in the wake of war, famine, and disease outbreaks. MSF intervention is bridging substantial gaps as the public health system in Ethiopia fails in conflict-affected areas, according to reports.