Research | Healthcare in Cambodia

For the poor the accessibility of healtcare in Cambodia is mediocre. Public healthcare is too expensive for the poor due to the corruption. Most of the poor people are not willing to use public health services. Instead they rely on selfhealing or traditional healers. According to UNDP people die at an average age of 57, that is lower than in neighbouring countries. Infant mortality rate is at about 95 per 1,000 live births. Cambodians also have more babies, die more often in malaria and are more likely to die when giving a birth than their Vietnamese or Thai neighbours. Health situation in Cambodia is among the worst in the world.

–High cost
Poor health comes with a high price in Cambodia. Cambodians spend averagely 33$ per person a year to treat sickness while goverments health expenditure is only about 2$ per capita. For the money the citizens spend on healthcare they'll get untrained doctors and drug sellers or "freelancing" government health workers for help and the expense can even worsen their condition and destroy families and threat their lives.“Expenditure on health care is one of the main reasons people are pushed into poverty—they have to sell off assets to pay for services,”
(Indu Bhushan, Asia Development Bank.) And on the other hand poverty is one of the main reasons of poor health, and that forms a vicious circle. Many districts in Cambodia still lack properly equipped hospital buildings and educated staff. Also, the capacity of the Ministry of Health to plan, manage, and finance health services remains weak.

–Problems in the system
When Cambodia was liberated from the Khmer Rouge rule in 1979, there weren't any doctors or nurses, no medical equipment, no handbooks, laboratory facilities or any other essentials. The government started training medical personnel using recovered hand-written notes from the pre-1975 medical classes. Training involved copying the notes verbatim in a situation where paper, pens, pencils and everything else, especially money, was in short supply. Even today for example the one year education of midwives doesn't include any clinical experience which is one reason to high mortality of women giving birth. Although there has been major development in healtcare since Khmer Rouge time due to different programs involving foreign money and NGO's, inadequate facilities and obsolete and inappropriate practices are troubling the health care system, especially considering the poor. Cambodian government funding remains an acute problem.

Stagnation and the very low levels of medical care in the public sector reflect the absence of the rule of law in Cambodia and the lack of genuine political will for change at the highest levels. Certainly, the Cambodian government health budget, which in 1998 reflects six per cent of the national budget, indicates something less than full commitment. - Stephan Rousseau, the head of MEDICAM

–Notes

• Problems in the healthcare system are substantial and corruption related
  
• The cost of healthcare for the poor is so high that it leads to a vicious circle
• Many organisations or corporations are dealing with healthcare in Cambodia. for example UNDP, UNICEF, ADB and GE.

–Reference
Healing Cambodia's Health Care by Eric Van Zant, Asian Development Bank. [http://www.adb.org/Documents/Periodicals/ADB_Review/2004/vol36_3/healing.asp], retrieved May 2, 2010.
Asian Human Rights Commission by Beth Goldring, Human Right Solidarity [http://www.hrsolidarity.net/mainfile.php/1999vol09no02/795/], retrieved May 2, 2010.