Re: What must be done about the killings of Pakistani healthcare workers?
To reply to the (rhetorical) title of the article, one would say that a lot must be done, but in reality nothing can be done.
Someone said that health workers cannot be provided security, I strongly disagree.
Foreign donors pump millions of dollars into the polio campaign, but the extent of corruption at all levels is astounding. Take for instance the much acclaimed independent polio campaign monitoring project conducted in February 2012, whose aim was to assess how many areas had been covered and left uncovered in the recent polio vaccination campaign.
I was part of the monitoring campaign in February and was shocked to know that while polio vaccinators got paid around Rs 200 for the whole day’s work, the vehicle (a brand new Toyota Corolla) that had been hired to take us (2 independent monitors) to 2 localities with a cluster of 25-50 houses each had costed Rs 2500 for the whole day.
That was just one vehicle. There were hundreds of teams, and god knows how many cars had been hired that day at that rate.
Needless to say, the corolla could not even enter the narrow alleys of the areas where we were taken. We moved on foot while the the driver of our car (and other independent monitoring teams) was unfamiliar with the localities and neighbourhoods he had been assigned to take us to, and preferred not to leave the vehicle unattended as they felt they would be stolen.
What exactly is the point of spending 100 times that money just on a car to get monitoring done?
Why cant these agencies spend the monitoring money on hiring security personnel, who will come at a cheaper cost, or just give more money to vaccinators so they are motivated to do their work well.
They even paid us doctors money for monitoring, but that is not the right way to deal with poor coverage. Besides this the monitors did not get to decide where they'd go, their itineraries and even the clusters had been pre-decided, which meant that the reported vaccine coverage was inflated.
The monitoring campaign was in my opinion a resource wasting exercise.
But by the end of the day, I also realized that for the amount of money and insults these polio vaccinators get hurled their way, they do an excellent job and deserve respect.
At the end, I would just say that Pakistan is a poor Third World country with limited resources and even limited credibility with the developed countries. I have lived here all my life, and am not a self-hating Pakistan but that is just how the situation stands today and it would be foolish to think otherwise. So many people are killed everyday that a human life holds little to no value. The stories of the vaccinators who lost their lives have faded – people in this country are resilient, but the cost of that is insensitivity and indifference.
(All of the above is my personal experience and opinion. If anyone has anything else to add, please do so.)
Rapid Response:
Re: What must be done about the killings of Pakistani healthcare workers?
To reply to the (rhetorical) title of the article, one would say that a lot must be done, but in reality nothing can be done.
Someone said that health workers cannot be provided security, I strongly disagree.
Foreign donors pump millions of dollars into the polio campaign, but the extent of corruption at all levels is astounding. Take for instance the much acclaimed independent polio campaign monitoring project conducted in February 2012, whose aim was to assess how many areas had been covered and left uncovered in the recent polio vaccination campaign.
I was part of the monitoring campaign in February and was shocked to know that while polio vaccinators got paid around Rs 200 for the whole day’s work, the vehicle (a brand new Toyota Corolla) that had been hired to take us (2 independent monitors) to 2 localities with a cluster of 25-50 houses each had costed Rs 2500 for the whole day.
That was just one vehicle. There were hundreds of teams, and god knows how many cars had been hired that day at that rate.
Needless to say, the corolla could not even enter the narrow alleys of the areas where we were taken. We moved on foot while the the driver of our car (and other independent monitoring teams) was unfamiliar with the localities and neighbourhoods he had been assigned to take us to, and preferred not to leave the vehicle unattended as they felt they would be stolen.
What exactly is the point of spending 100 times that money just on a car to get monitoring done?
Why cant these agencies spend the monitoring money on hiring security personnel, who will come at a cheaper cost, or just give more money to vaccinators so they are motivated to do their work well.
They even paid us doctors money for monitoring, but that is not the right way to deal with poor coverage. Besides this the monitors did not get to decide where they'd go, their itineraries and even the clusters had been pre-decided, which meant that the reported vaccine coverage was inflated.
The monitoring campaign was in my opinion a resource wasting exercise.
But by the end of the day, I also realized that for the amount of money and insults these polio vaccinators get hurled their way, they do an excellent job and deserve respect.
At the end, I would just say that Pakistan is a poor Third World country with limited resources and even limited credibility with the developed countries. I have lived here all my life, and am not a self-hating Pakistan but that is just how the situation stands today and it would be foolish to think otherwise. So many people are killed everyday that a human life holds little to no value. The stories of the vaccinators who lost their lives have faded – people in this country are resilient, but the cost of that is insensitivity and indifference.
(All of the above is my personal experience and opinion. If anyone has anything else to add, please do so.)
Competing interests: No competing interests