Huge Spending Needed to Solve Health Crisis

Initial steps to improve Turkmenistan’s health care system should include a massive spending increase, reforms to medical education, and a higher standard of professional training, NBCentralAsia commentators say.



A recent presentation in Washington hosted by the Open Society Institute heard that during his 15 year rule, former president Saparmurat Niazov closed numerous medical institutions, dismissed 15,000 doctors and withdrew state funding for hospitals. As a result, people in Turkmenistan have great difficulty accessing medical treatment and the mortality rate has risen significantly, according to speakers at the event, entitled “Public Health Crisis in Turkmenistan: International Responses".



NBCentralAsia commentators say that the healthcare crisis is a result of 15 years of chronic underfunding.



Vyacheslav Mamedov, a NBCentralAsia political observer, sees a need for a substantial increase in spending to buy medicines.



Under Niazov’s rule, he said, officials would cream off large amounts of money allocated to the health service and use it for other purposes. For example, by the time government money earmarked for the Balkan region in western Turkmenistan arrived, anything from a third to nearly half of it had disappeared – taken by local officials to fund for one of the grandiose construction schemes common at the time.



Mamedov suggests that the interim authorities, headed by acting president Gurbanguly Berdymuhammedov, should allocate sufficient funds to revive medical training, build or repair hospitals and, initially at least, recruit foreign doctors to plug staffing gaps.



He hopes Berdymuhammedov’s medical background will help. The acting president and election favourite used to be a dentist and has been health minister for the past five years. But while in the latter job, he oversaw an unprecedented cull of medical staff in March 2004 – some reports say he initiated it.



According to an NBCentralAsia source in Turkmenistan, medical staff are so poorly trained that Niazov publicly complained that young doctors were “not even able to give an injection”.



“Anyone who acquired their medical degree recently should be sent on a compulsory three-year training course,” said NBCentralAsia’s source.



(News Briefing Central Asia draws comment and analysis from a broad range of political observers across the region.)