HEALTHCARE experts have been pointing at the burden many rural households face – and actually bear – when they have to contend with non-communicable diseases like hypertension, diabetes or the threat of tumours.

This is primarily because accessing care can be prohibitively costly, what with having to travel from residences in villages to hospitals where medical attention can be provided.

At a recent gathering of healthcare experts and medical researchers, energetic appeals were made on the need to ensure that rural medical centres are facilitated with experts on such needs for diagnosis and prescription, even if they are not stationed there all the time. 

This is compounded by the vast shortages of medical personnel and teaching staff, etc., adding up to a vicious cycle where rural areas find it difficult to have qualified personnel attend to their needs in relation to non-communicable diseases.

Similarly, rural areas aren’t likely to obtain all the medicines they need and at the right prices – where patient insurance cover is often limited – until the situation is satisfactory in major hospitals.

Reports that family members often have to part with belongings for a form of pawning so as to obtain medical care are distressing, and many people obviously have vivid recollections of such scenarios.

Items like mobile phones are known to have been among the first to be pawned when a family has its back to the wall. And such recourse is a moment of intense pain, as such items are significant enablers of freedom at a personal level. Help needs to be on the way.

The point here is that there are no easy answers to assurance of medical care without respect to location of where one lives, and indeed in disregard of the patient’s earnings or those of the family.

Poverty is a shared risk, as hospitals or dispensaries will operate on this premise while families too will be prone to cracks in personal medicare and welfare generally, which reflects underlying poverty.

Appeals that this should not be the case remind one of an exclamation attributed to classical scientist Isaac Newton, skeptical to the last that the world can be uplifted to the point of saying: “I could lift the world if I had somewhere to stand.”