Via MSF.org, a report that gives us some idea of the scope of the Rohingya disaster: Bangladesh: Summary of MSF operations in Cox’s Bazar. The summary:
Number of health facilities: 10 health posts; 4 primary health centres (open around the clock); and five inpatient health facilities (providing 24-hour secondary healthcare).
Number of staff: To respond to the fastest-growing refugee crisis in the world, MSF’s team in Cox’s Bazar has increased 10-fold in the past six months to more than 2,800 staff – the majority of them Bangladeshi nationals.
Number of patients: Over the past 6 months, our teams carried out 351,421 outpatient and 8,135 inpatient consultations.
Main morbidities: Respiratory infections, diarrhoeal diseases, skin diseases – all related to poor living conditions.
Water and sanitation: This is key to prevent the spread of disease. Activities include drilling boreholes and tube wells, installing a gravity-fed water supply system, trucking in water, desludging old latrines, constructing new sustainable latrines, doing bucket chlorination and distributing domestic water filters.
Mental health services: This has been scaled up, with more counsellors added to existing teams, services available at additional health posts, and training outreach workers to provide basic psychosocial support.
Outreach: Teams focus on health promotion, outbreak prevention, alert and response, while a surveillance team gathers demographic, nutritional, mortality and natality indicators, covering 80% of the refugees’ settlements. The teams also do active case-finding and referral to health facilities for diagnosis and treatment, as well as defaulter tracing and mobilisation for vaccination. An all-female team spreads messages about sexual and reproductive health in the community.
