Emergency Health Care for Poor Afghan Women

The Professor Sakena Yacoobi Private Hospital in Herat treats all patients who come to its doors, even if they cannot afford to pay. The best way for you to understand how important this work is for patients is to hear their own words. Here is Farzana’s experience:

My name is Farzana and I am 24 years old living in Herat city, Afghanistan. I come from a poor family where my husband is a bus-driver for low wages, and we are 3 in my family. After a few years of my marriage, I wasn’t getting pregnant and we thought that this was something that we can’t do anything about. One of my friends told me to get referred to a hospital for an operation.

Though I went to many private hospitals,  I couldn’t do it because of the many expenses that we couldn’t afford to pay and I couldn’t get operated on at the governmental hospitals since they didn’t do such operations.

I was really desperate and hopeless till one of my relatives told me about the Professor Sakena Yaccobi Private Hospital. As soon as I was went there, I was scheduled for an operation and was there for a few days. The hospital didn’t take much money for my operation which has changed my life. After a short time, I got pregnant and I had a boy at that same hospital. Now I am living my life with my family and we are very happy. I sincerely want to thank the doctors of the hospital who are really experts in this work and have a great team around them.

A life changed! Many more experience the same benefits. In the last 3 months, there have been 2,539 patients treated, including 33 births at the hospital.

Thanks for your support.

Herat city benefits from the excellent medical care available at The Professor Yacoobi Private Hospital. This state of the art facility provides much needed treatment, particularly surgeries to patients who have few medical alternatives. So far in 2014, 160 surgeries were performed with staff continuing to operate a sliding scale for fees.

These surgeries would not have happened without support from donors like you. The hospital accepts fees from patients who can pay and uses these to subsidize the poor patients’ care but this does not go far enough. Additional funding through this project is vital to ensure everyone gets the treatment they need and no one is turned away because they cannot afford to pay. People often travel great distances to reach this facility because of its reputation.

Here is a patient story: “My name is Zarqoona. I am a 22 year old woman with 3 children living 30 km from Herat city. My husband is a worker. I had pregnancy problems after my last birth two years ago. I sometimes had internal bleeding since then and my husband was too poor to pay the expenses of my medical treatment.

My cousin attended a Reproductive health Workshop held by AIL; there she found out about the Professor Sakena Yacoobi clinic, and then she called me to come to this hospital for a free checkup. I was so happy and asked my husband take me to the hospital. The doctors were kind and the equipment very modern. After a checkup, I had to stay in the hospital for two days because my problem was serious. The doctor prescribed me some tablets and syrups. I am completely recovered for a few months now.  

The hospital administration updates equipment whenever possible and recently a portable ultrasound machine was donated and will soon be en route from the USA to Afghanistan. This will help with the necessary diagnostic testing which is performed on site including ultrasounds (655 conducted in 2014). The hospital pays attention to educating its staff and is currently seeking to send one of its doctors to the US for hospital site visits as a continuing education opportunity.