EITD Research

    Cameroon Public Utilities Forum

Health   

There is an increasing array of health service providers in Cameroon. These range from polyvalent physicians of traditional medicines to very specialised practitioners of modern scientific approaches in therapy. They provide services in a great variety of clinics, hospitals and other health centres. The number of health institutions and workers has been increasing with training and other investments in response to demand that is high and increasingly steady.

Even so, levels of public satisfaction with health services has been low and declining. For example, maternal mortality rates have been increasing together with under five mortality rates, and the number of births not attended by trained health personnel has been going up, despite the increasing number of health centres and trained health workers. Several of the health services on offer have not only been under-performing and jeopardising public trust. They frustrate many patients, who approach available health services expecting health issue solutions in vain. Over 93% of deaths in Cameroon towns and villages are attributable to preventable or treatable diseases such as malaria, diarrhoea, pneumonia, cholera, dysentery, meningitis, schistosomiasis, sleeping sickness, yellow fever, typhoid, mal-nutrition, and now, HIV/AIDS.

The thorny health problems include widespread corruption in available health services, inadequate preventive and therapeutic protocols that are research based, lack of agreed quality of service/care standards and near absence of evaluation mechanisms that promote responsiveness, accountability, innovation and growth in providing, accessing and equalising opportunities in health service systems.