More than 40 health facilities in Western scale down services

By LULU MARK
MORE than 40 church-run health facilities in Western have scaled down services since Friday because workers had not been paid for the past four months, an official says.
Hector Morris, the secretary of Evangelical Church of PNG (ECPNG) health services in Lower Fly, told The National yesterday that 70 per cent of health facilities in the province were run by the churches.
“The people depend on the churches for reliable and quality healthcare because most of government-run health facilities in Western are closed, run- down, poorly managed or lack staff,” he said.
He said the church health services reached the most remote areas of the province.
The ECPNG owns and manages 38 health facilities including rural and district hospitals, health centres and aid posts, and one community health worker training school with 222 staff. He said the Catholic and Seventh-Day Adventist churches also run similar health facilities.
“For ECPNG, the health service work in Western began in 1935, four years after the first missionaries set foot in 1931 and this is the first time in our history to scale down services,” he said.
Patients are now advised on their arrival of the conditions of the partial stop-work so that they could go to the government facilities.
“People are coming to the Balimo Hospital, the biggest in Middle Fly and we are directing them to the government facility three kilometres away.”