Published in the Guardian on September 14, 2012 . Read the full article here.
On a sunny Wednesday afternoon, 16-year-old Vasco Mzanda limped into a district health centre in Zambia‘s southern province, accompanied by his father, Listen. Three weeks earlier, Vasco had been riding his bicycle near his village when a car hit him, causing him to fly off the dirt road. When he stood up, he had trouble walking and could not put any weight on his left leg.
Vasco’s injuries were exacerbated by Zambia’s healthcare system. Listen immediately took his son to the nearby rural health post. But it did not have any diagnostic equipment, so Vasco was referred to the district health centre, 60km away. Having saved money for the 60,000 kwacha (£7.50) round-trip fare and paid for an X-ray once there, Listen learned that his son’s femur had been fractured; in the three weeks without care, the bone had partially “malunited”. The district hospital did not have the surgical equipment to fix it, so the attendant doctor told them to find their way to Livingstone general hospital, another 130km away.
There are more than 20,000 road traffic accidents every year in Zambia, resulting in an estimated 3,000 deaths and exponentially more injuries and disabilities. The country has less than 0.02% of the world’s registered vehicles, but almost 14 times the proportion of fatalities from road traffic accidents. Many injuries, like Vasco’s, are technically simple to treat. But without adequate emergency care, transportation or referral systems, many patients experience unnecessary complications. Some suffer from neglected physical trauma, some become permanently handicapped, and others die needlessly.
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