Our Health Systems Aren ’t Ready for the Rising Demand for Mental Health Services

November 19, 2018Need is growing by the hour.The stomachache started soon after she gave birth to her last child, and it didn ’t stop for years. When she finally made her way to a hospital, the doctors performed a hysterectomy—but it didn’t go well. A day later, she realized she was leaking urine.“I told them something wasn’t right,” the woman tells us. “But they told me everything was fine and that I needed to go home.”The woman says all this in a monotone as we sit under a tree outside the hospital.The surgery had caused an obstetric fistula, which persisted over the next five years and forced her to go through several unsuccessful repair surgeries, until finally the last one —provided through IntraHealth International’sFistula Mali project in May 2017 —worked.The woman says all this in a monotone as we sit together under a tree outside the hospital in Kayes, Mali, where her final surgery took place. Yes, we can take her picture, she says. But she doesn ’t want us to show her face or use her name. Physically, she’s healed, but she doesn’t yet feel whole again. She still remembers the pain and isolation, the way family members covered their noses when she tried to visit them.“People invite me over now, but I still refuse,” she says. “I’m in the habit of staying home and being alone now.”A few months later, I was thinking about this woman as I sat in one meeting room after another at the 2018Health Systems Research Symposiumin Liverpool, ...
Source: IntraHealth International - Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Source Type: news