Recent unfortunate events occurring in the health sector and notably in the Douala, Yaounde and Mbanga hospitals have necessarily thrown some opprobrium on the same services across the country.

For understandable reasons; because health is a holistic issue not limited, as it were, strictly to medical care, but for all other factors surrounding it and which can range from a friendly welcome into a hospital to even the cleanliness of the hospital environment.

But nature has made things in a way that only the bad side of things is usually widely publicized; and one can within this premise easily understand why the human interest happenings in these hospitals in recent times attracted so much media attention which gave a grubby image of our hospitals and their environment. This image however obscures numerous initiatives that have been taken in the sector of health around the national territory. One can even talk of a technological revolution.

The past few years have seen the construction of first-class hospitals in Douala, Yaounde and Sangmelima as well as serious renovation works on many others, especially in the Regions and which have taken up bed capacity remarkably. The problem of medical emergencies which has been a weak link in the health delivery system for a very long time was recently addressed with the inauguration of an ultra-modern facility in Yaounde. Gone are the days when wailing patients waiting for attendance were found all over the place at hospital entrances in virtually all the public hospitals of the national capital.

Now patients upon arrival are immediately taken care of and the payment of huge financial deposits which has been a bone of contention is no longer the condition for admitting patients. Patients are admitted first and the financial obligations about their admission are addressed later. The good intentions of government in putting up this new facility may however be quickly undermined because of the attitude of many patients who would rather not pay any fee at all.

Within the first three months of operation officials of the emergency hospital in Yaounde were already reporting a huge debt which could impede the functioning of this vital unit. Inasmuch as money is not placed before any consideration, patients must also understand that the unit needs money to run and continue to provide services through the regular payment of staff and other recurrent expenditure such as paying for medication, water and electricity bills and repair of the sophisticated equipment in the hospital.

Beyond this important technological input, government has also created Haemodialysis centres in all the Regions, a move that has greatly reduced the difficulties experienced before and which required patients to travel from all parts of the country to be attended to in the lone centres in Yaounde and Douala. The same can be said of the generalization of medical imagery units in all the Regions. Beforehand even the simplest medical scanning processes had to be carried almost exclusively in Yaounde or Douala.

Within a very short time span health services in the country have experienced a veritable technological revolution, reducing the numerous medical evacuations to foreign countries and whose exorbitant costs impacted very negatively on the country’s already overstretched finances.