Malakal Teaching Hospital in a sorry state

By Simon Deng

Malakal Teach Hospital, the main health referral facility in Upper Nile State is struggling with poor medical administration and understaffing.

The hospital has only two functional departments including the outpatient and obstetric and gynaecology, Khat Deng Ayiei, the Medical Director of the facility told Juba Echo in an interview.

It is one of the key infrastructures battered in the six years of crisis.

The facility has been kept alive by a project administered by the Ministry of Health, the World Bank Group and UNICEF which began in July 2019 and will end by June this year.

The project helped provide health services to about 97 health facilities across the state.

“As administration of Malakal teaching hospital, we are appealing to our donors to make some good consideration and make some step ahead, we are just having only two department, outpatient, obstetrics and gynecology,” Ayiei said.

He said Malakal Teaching Hospital is run with the assistance of only 9 nurses.

Ayiei made no mention of doctors.

“We are appealing to our government to put more efforts in the health system in Malakal town. There is gap, we were suggesting to have more registered midwives and nurses,” he said.

According to Ayiei,

Ayiei said the departments of internal medicine and surgery have no consultant rendering it difficult to provide services.

Nyango John Adwok, the Director General of Malakal Teaching Hospital said the facility is being treated as a primary health care unit.

“Actually, we have a lot of problems, you can see infrastructure is really in a very bad condition,” Adwok said.

“We do not have X-ray, we do not have radiology, maternity block.”