Libyan health crisis deepens
TRIPOLI: Unable to get specialist care for his six-year-old daughter in Libya or a visa for treatment abroad, Abdulhakim Shaybi bought a motor boat and set off with her last month across the Mediterranean.
Two-and-a-half hours into their journey from Sabratha in western Libya, they reached a European ship deployed to rescue migrants.
“I raised a white flag to the ship in a sign of peace,” Shaybi said by phone this week from the Italian city of Genoa, where his daughter Sajida, who has the rare blood cell disease aplastic anemia, is now undergoing tests. “My friend told them that we have a sick little girl.”
The story was quickly picked up on social media as an illustration of the tragic consequences of Libya’s health system collapsing amid poor security, a funding crisis, and chronic shortages of staff and medicine.
Problems only seem to have become more acute since a UN-backed government arrived in Tripoli in March aiming to end the armed conflict and political turmoil that has plagued Libya for years. It is gradually trying to assert its authority, but remains opposed by some factions on the ground.
Shaybi said he decided on the boat trip after visiting Tripoli Central Hospital earlier this year and finding it “in a disastrous condition, one hundred times worse than before. There was no nursing staff at night, no medicine, and no healthcare at all.”
The hospital is now in a sorry state, afflicted by power and water cuts and starved of resources.
Three months ago, the emergency room was shut after one male nurse was shot and another was beaten. The morgue has run out of space because staff are waiting for authorisation to bury unclaimed bodies. Of 250 foreign nurses, just 40 are left, and female Libyan nurses are afraid to work because of security threats.
“We are only conducting emergency operations now,” General Manager Mukhtar al Habbas said. “We have no anaesthetic, sterilising materials, or medical gauze, so how we can work?”
It is a similar tale across Libya. About half of the country’s 159 hospitals are either closed or barely delivering services, said Haroon Rashid, a World Health Organization official.
Before the uprising that toppled Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, Libya had some of the best health indicators in the region, he said, though it was also unusually dependent on foreign doctors and nurses, using its oil income to employ them on generous terms. But some 80 per cent of those workers have left, depriving medical facilities of specialist care needed in neonatal units or to treat high rates of casualties from traffic accidents.