Kapoeta North County in dire health situation
Warning: Undefined array key 0 in /home2/cityrevi/public_html/wp-content/themes/_city/single.php on line 65
JUBA – Kapoeta North County in Eastern Equatoria State is in a health crisis as only two out of the sixteen health units are functioning.
It has been two years since14 health facilities ceased operating due to insecurity.
“There are only two health facilities working out of the sixteen health units in Kapoeta North County. This forced the local community to move for more than 10 miles in search of health services,’’ County Commissioner, Emmanuel Lolimo Epone told City Review.
“The communities often lose their relatives on their way to health facilities in Kapoeta North because the nearby health facilities are not working,” he lamented.
“We have only two health facilities out of fourteen providing health services to the local community,” Lolimo decried.
Deep in crisis
Kapoeta North is the biggest county in Eastern Equatoria State with a population of 198,000 people, whose main economic activities are subsistence farming and cattle keeping.
Lolimo said currently they are experiencing increasing cases of malaria and diarrhea amid the existing big gap of health services in the county.
“We do admit that the biggest challenges have been the few numbers of health centers and distances between these health facilities,” he said.
According to the Ministry of Health, each state in South Sudan was supposed to have a hospital, then counties and Payams were supposed to have Primary Health Care Centre with maternity wards.
Appeal
Lolimo appealed to the state government to restock the non-functional health facilities to enable the communities to have access to health services to minimize unnecessary death.
He said less than 30 percent of the population in the county have access to health services and only less than 20 percent of pregnant women give birth at the health facility.
A multi-sector survey conducted in 2020 indicates that the mortality rate in children under five stands at more than 3 percent with Kapoeta North, East, and South leading.
The survey confirms that 42 percent of mothers have to walk more than 1 hour for pre and post-natal care worst in Kapoeta East, and knowledge on infant and young child feeding (IYCF) is very low in greater Kapoeta.
