It’s been 2 years since 700,000 Rohingya refugees fled to Bangladesh after the violence in Myanmar. Right now there are over 900,000 Rohingya at the refugee camp. The plan proposed by the governments of Bangladesh and Myanmar last November as well as last month failed as not enough refugees agreed to return to Myanmar. Due to this unclear situation, the Joint Response Plan 2019 put an emphasis on long term development in response to the unfolding situation.

The health care center run by PWJ

The medical clinic run by PWJ plays a large role in supporting the 32000 refugees of Camp 14. To protect the health of the refugees as well as the local residents, advice from medical experts are being used to improve the quality of the treatments offered. For example, a database containing diagnosis, treatment and prescriptions are being kept in order to ensure correct medical treatment as well as a way to be able to easily teach local doctors about medical treatments.

A senior doctor conducting a seminar on dengue fever

Through the database, trends of sicknesses can be easily identified and action can be taken early to prevent widespread infection. Not only can this, by analyzing the data, medicine that is not needed can be removed. The data gathered can also be shared amongst other medical groups to provide further data on preventing other communicable diseases. As the crisis continues, patients for Non-communicable diseases such as diabetes also have begun to seek treatment at the medical facilities.

A doctor conducting a checkup

Although a database is very useful, it is a lot of work to maintain. In Japan, a medical insurance card and a medical history card will have everything you need to know about a patient. A doctor can use electronic equipment to review a patient’s medical history to make an accurate diagnosis. However, it is different in Bangladesh. Some patients don’t bring an ID card despite telling them many times. There is only one computer which means that at the end of the day, the staff have to input patient data into a single excel sheet. Not only this, the internet is very slow which means it takes a long time for the data to upload and shared. This means that data that may seem simple to obtain could actually be very difficult.

However, we will keep working together to provide high quality medical assistance in order to protect the health of the Rohingya as well as the local residents here. I would also like to thank everyone who has supported us in this project.