Two years ago, when I was posted at Beltar Primary Health Care Center (PHC), little did I know that a sparsely populated village’s abundance of space rarely follows through to the emergency room. The obvious lack of infrastructure is, of course, the major problem. In the health system of Nepal, emergency services are designed to be provided at the hospital level. However, keeping the need for emergency services in mind, health workers in the rural areas are left to run makeshift ERs. At our PHC, what was supposed to be the waiting lobby for patients was used for an ER. The lack of a four-walled room meant that the only sense of privacy was provided by the patient’s fumbling awareness owing to intense pain and the physician’s focus completely overwhelmed by trying to be resourceful amidst obvious lack of resources. Hordes of curious onlookers crowding to see what was going on is a common scene in our ER that one would start ignoring after a month or two.
After banging our heads on problems that require far more resources and policies than that within our reach, we are left to take a sensible path – focusing on one small thing at a time and changing it for the better. Today I present to you an incident that inspired us to make an effort into making one such change happen.