Saturday, 8 June 2013

In a Primary Health Centre

I want to share two incidents I went through with all of you. Both happened in Primary health centres in a village. Not in the same village and not at the same time.

One of those happened in a village about 30 years back. I had gone to a factory and - the situation is not important - but managed to cut my forefinger on left hand. Cut means really cut into almost two pieces. about a centimeter of my fingertip was dangling down on a thin skin coated with the blood flowing out. It happened to be a Sunday and the doctors were out and dispensaries closed.

My friend took me to the Primary Health Centre in the village where the factory was situated. Being Sunday, the doctor was not in the centre but luckily available at home. It was not the era of cellphones and the landline phones were very unreliable. The attender in the health centre who happened to be staying in that complex volenteered to go and call the doctor.

The doctor came and put back my dangling fingertip to the finger stub on the main body and stitched up. It was really nice of him to come and help me.

While parting he said, 'as soon as you reach your place, please show it to your family doctor. In this place we do not have much facilities nor equipments. I did whatever could be done with available equipments. Your doctor will tell you if anything further is to be done.'

Luckily the wound healed properly.

The second moment happened a few days back. I had got hurt and acquired a fairly decent wound at the back of my head and was taken to a private clinic in town about 15 kms away. Only a dressing was needed so the task was assigned to a junior. The junior, she just cleaned up my wound and put some medicine. No dressing was done, as she said it is better to leave it open for faster healing.

After a couple of days I just went to the village Primary Health Centre to get the wound checked and see anything further is to be done. The doctor said there is no problem, the wound is healing up. But the way the doctor examined me gave me a lot more confidence than I got from the other clinic two days back.

Another thing to mentioned is that this health centre in the village was kept very clean - cleaner than the other clinic. I want to take this opportunity to congratulate the doctor and the team!

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