First things first!

J. Roughan

16 July 2009

Honiara 

 

Honiara City Council recently announced it was seriously planning to construct the nation's first "children's hospital" in the Pacific. What great news! Here, right in the heart of the city, is to be a hospital dedicated primarily to the well being of children and open 24/7. It looks like some people in authority have put on their collective thinking hats and are intending to have the city take serious steps in the health business. 

 

But then I started to think. How much difference will a new hospital do with the filth of the city which has been collecting for many years now. What about the mounds of rubbish that have not been collected for more than five years now. Yes, not five days, 5 weeks or 5 months but five years.now.

 

These mounds of uncollected rubbish are the happy home of cockroaches, rats and other vermin. If the medical profession worldwide has learned anything over the past half century, it knows that the best way to fight disease, reduce skin troubles and weaken the grip of sicknesses is to keep a town clean, destroy the breeding  places of diseases and make a clean surrounding the target. 

 

Hospitals are for curing people who fall sick. Preventing sickness in the first place is a much more powerful way of making and keeping people healthy. No, don't get me wrong. Of course a Child's Hospital is a great idea. But a more powerful way to insure our children's health is to insure everyone in town is healthy.

 

At present there's not a single public toilet for more than 80,000 Honiara residences. The greatest health strides of the 20th century were not found in its penicillin, antibiotics and other medical miracles but the humdrum work of getting rid of human waste, keeping public places clean and insuring plenty of good, clean and plentiful water around.

 

We in Honiara have none of the above! No public toilets, little running water and the filth of our town roads is embarrassing to say the least. I  normally ask any first time visitor to Honiara what is their biggest surprise. Too often I get back this response: "The town is so dirty!" I don't bother arguing with them since their first-time insights are right on target.

 

All my toktok is not set out to stop Honiara City Council from going ahead with its plans to erect a Children's Hospital but to ask questions about the context of this new hospital. If the town can't clean up its streets, if rubbish is hardly ever collected, if good, clean water is rarely delivered then, a half dozen new hospitals will not make much a difference to town health.

 

Malaria reduction in the Solomons has come about not by posting a medical doctor in each village, erecting new hospitals in every ward but by making sure of three fundamentals of primary health. Have people sleep under treated mosquito nets nightly, keeping village grass and weeds low and when a person does come down with malaria, immediately treat the sick person with anti-malarial medicine. By following these three rules, more and more malaria has been beaten.

 

As said before, yes, go ahead put up a Children's Hospital but at the same time let's get the town looking clean, build at least half a dozen  public toilets--leased out and run locally for profit--and demanding more clean water. If we can get these three things going, after a few years we might actually close the hospital down . . . there won't be enough sick children around town to use it!