Deaths, delays and dismay: dissecting the political economy of unattended deaths in the province of aurora and the ailing national health care system behind it

Abstract

It is very unsettling to know that a part of your population dies without medical assistance. They die in the margins, when no one else can hear they cry, and when no one else is there to help out. Justice is nowhere to be found for a country which is worldwide known to be an exporter of health professionals. Negligence is a grave disservice to the people who deserves to live; for they are the constituents of the present and the substructure of the future towards genuine development. This study embodies the landscape of the province of Aurora's health care system - a semi-urban and semi-rural province with an unattended death rate of 7.7 is very alarming and should be investigated. The area was chosen upon the aim of the author to give back to the province where she spent primary schooling by conducting a study that discusses the needs for provincial health care system improvement and development. Through a fieldwork that included interviews and a case study, the researcher found out that the prevalence of unattended death is a result of poor health care supply that breeds a culture of low health seeking behaviour. The percentage of the population who died unattended is a product of geographical disadvantages, lack of health infrastructures, urban-rural gap in health care, trained personnel mismanagement, lack of health education and promotion, poor integration of cultural beliefs and modern medicine, lack of communications, infrastructure and technology, natural calamities and economic inequality. Death is a product of interrelation of different social forces. It should be addressed from the grass roots through health prioritizing schemes of the government and targeting the rural areas as points of development. The health care system of a country should always act to minimize death; for the people are the nation's wealth, and health is the population's wealth.