- Md. Ishaque Faruquee
Today is world health day. We are celebrating this day with the theme `Health for all.’ A very attractive and enthusiastic message for all people. This year world health organization is also celebrating their 75th birthday. Happy birthday WHO!
Earlier World Health Organization (WHO) mentioned that, 30% of the global population is not able to access essential health services. In Bangladesh, we are suffering a lot. Adolescents are more vulnerable these days. We can say that, Health is Wealth, a good book to read but not for memorize. On Sexual & Reproductive Health issue, Proper healthcare services from health corners are golden bear somewhere. Who knows that how many days can be waited by the girls and women.
Sustainable Development Goal indicated that By 2030, ensure universal access to sexual and reproductive health-care services, including for family planning, information and education, and the integration of reproductive health into national strategies and programmes.
But what is the present scenario? World Health Organization remarked that Bangladesh facing fertility rate 2.1 births per woman, Adolescent birth rate 83 per 1000 women 15-19 years old, early marriage 58.6%, Maternal mortality ratio 173 per 100,000 live births in 2021. According to UNDP report on 2022, Women and girls are the biggest victims of GBV. Girls, including children, faced 60% of sexual assaults in 2020-21 alone. When we aggregate women, girls, and children, they account for 88.2% of GBV cases. Men make up most of the perpetrators in Bangladesh.
Adolescents are assaulted day by day. This is not just physical torture. Social, familial, economical, psychological, behavioral. Most of the cases are same in plian land; but hill area is quite different. Lack of money, insufficiency of health equipment, unavailability of doctors, scarcity of medicines, barriers of language, distance, time management, syndicate, autocracy, bad impacts of climate change bears the payment of society. Somewhere no infrastructure is the vital cause of health facilities. Then how can an adolescent can survive without health facilities. In that case early marriage, gender-based violence, sexual and reproductive health and rights are knocking the health systems. Good referral system and health facilities for adolescents is now the burning question under the blanket.
Based on SDG, achieve universal health coverage, including financial risk protection, access to quality essential health-care services and access to safe, effective, quality and affordable essential medicines and vaccines for all.
Universal Healthcare Index shows that Bangladesh scored 51, while ranked in the world is 142, Care System Score 39.2 and ranked in the world is 131. In the proposed budget for Fiscal Year (FY) 2022-23, the total allocation for the health sector (i.e., for the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare-MoHFW) is nearly Tk. 369 billion, less than 5 percent of the national budget.
According to National Health Policy 2011, There are many primary goals, like: Establish health care as a right in all layers of society by ensuring essential elements of care, nutrition, and public health improvement, providing quality and easily accessible care, establish a community clinic to provide primary health care for every citizen, reduce maternal and child mortality rates significantly, ensure the necessary steps to improve maternal and child health status and ensure safe delivery services in each village, ensure easy accessibility and availability of family planning services, ensure gender equality in health-care services, make certain effective and efficient use of information technology in the health-care management system, ensure adequate supply of logistics and manpower in government health-care facilities to deliver quality health-care services, ensuring the availability of essential drugs by regulating prices for essential medicines, ensure impacts of climate change on health.
Burning factor of health is that the one fourth population of Bangladesh is needed health facilities from nearby health corners. So, Government needs initiative to rearrange and develop the Adolescent/Youth friendly health services corners for girls and adolescents in Village, Union, Upzilla and District level. To establish decentralization theory, government need to launch local referral system. To functionalize or establish A/YFHS corner can be a good health gift for the people, who needs government support most. We need to visualize that, no complexity for healthcare services can make healthy future.
Author: Md. Ishaque Faruquee, Lobby & Advocacy Officer, Simavi Netherlands. Development Worker, Communications Specialist and Capacity Builder.