SEPT. 20 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – An influx of migrants to Almaty looking for jobs has reduced the quality of public healthcare in the city, Kazakhstan’s deputy PM, Gulshara Abdykalikova, told media. Ms Abdykalikova specifically said that the quality of doctors and nurses needed to be improved.
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(News report from Issue No. 201, published on Sept. 24 2014)
JUNE 19 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – Doctors and nurses will receive a 28% salary rise next year, media quoted health minister Salidat Kairbekova as saying. Medical workers have long complained that they are underpaid, especially since a 20% devaluation of the tenge this year. Nurses in Kazakhstan are currently paid $436/month; doctors $620/month.
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(News report from Issue No. 190, published on June 25 2014)
YEREVAN/Armenia, JUNE 25 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) — This was the third time that 34-year-old Anoush, who was pregnant, and her mother-in- law had taken a bus from their village to Yerevan.
They wanted to find out if Anoush would keep the baby and this depended on what medical staff would say.
“My husband and his family want a boy. They want a boy to inherit their family name,” said Anoush.
This is Anoush’s fifth pregnancy, she has two daughters already. If medical staff told her that she was expecting a boy she would keep the baby. If it was a girl she wouldn’t.
Selective abortions are still relatively commonplace in Armenia for women from the villages. There, the pressure is on to produce a son as an heir.
A project prohibiting sex selective abortion will be introduced by the Ministry of Health as it has become a major concern to the government.
A recent UN-sponsored said selective abortion was damaging the normal demographic make-up of Armenia. According to research in 1993 the ratio of male to female newborns was 106 to 100. In 2012 the ratio has widen to 114 boys for every 100 girls.
Donara, a 50-year-old doctor, said that many women were being forced into abortions by their husbands or the family of their husbands.
“Today couples are parenting to one or two children and they want one of them be a baby boy. Perhaps the problem would be solved if they had better social conditions,” she said.
Some of the debate in Armenia has focused around not telling mothers what sex their baby is expected to be until after 30 weeks of pregnancy.
For Anoush, though, there was joy and relief as the doctors confirmed that she was finally expecting a son.
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(News report from Issue No. 190, published on June 25 2014)
SEPT. 22 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — Kazakhstan has introduced extra tests and is buying new equipment to increase the competency of its medical professionals, media reported.
Analysts have said that the quality of health care in Kazakhstan has not kept pace with economic development in the country over the past decade. Last year, government officials said that many medial staff in rural parts of Kazakhstan had never received formal training.
Now, according to the Tengrinews website, the government has introduced a series of tests for health carers. It reported that since Sept. 2, 300 doctors and nurses in Astana and Almaty have been sitting a 3-1/2 hour theory test followed by an hour-long practical exam.
This is part of a nationwide strategy to improve the level of healthcare in the country.
In its 2013 report on global competitiveness, the World Economic Forum generally rated Kazakhstan highly. The big exception was the quality of its healthcare which the report said was poor.
Kazakhstan’s minister of health, Salidat Kairbekova, admitted that too. Answering a question at a parliamentary committee meeting he said that some medical staff didn’t even know how to use a computer mouse properly.
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(News report from Issue No. 153, published on Sept. 25 2013)
SEPT. 3 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — President Ilham Aliyev’s team have been highlighting Azerbaijan’s jump up the ranks of the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness annual report.
It’s an election year, after all, in Azerbaijan and the WEF report is significant.
In an interview, Elnur Aslanov, head of the Mr Aliyev’s information centre, said Azerbaijan had moved to 39th position in the rankings from 48 last year because of the social and economic policies of the president.
It’s an impressive statistic. Azerbaijan has jumped from 55th position in 2011 and now lies above several EU states.
But it’s also worth looking at the detail.
The reason Azerbaijan ranks so highly in the WEF index is its high score for macroeconomic stability. Azerbaijan’s energy wealth gives it a healthy government debt ratio, a decent government budget balance and strong gross national savings. Azerbaijan also has relatively low inflation, another positive.
The report, though, also details serious shortcomings. These were mainly in the health and education sectors. Notably amongst these was the ranking for school management — 133rd in the world, out of 148 countries.
Significantly, too, of the business executives interviewed for the report nearly a quarter said corruption was still the biggest problem for doing business in Azerbaijan.
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(News report from Issue No. 151, published on Sept. 11 2013)
AUG. 28 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — Azerbaijan’s parliament will consider legislation that will force couples to take a series of health tests for HIV and other infections before they marry, media reported. A number of countries already insist on these tests, including some parts of Russia. Human rights groups criticise the tests as invasive.
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(News report from Issue No. 150, published on Sept. 2 2013)
JULY 15 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — Infant mortality is an important benchmark for a country’s development, both economically and socially.
That’s why the Switzerland-based World Economic Forum includes infant mortality in its Global Competitiveness Index. That’s also why it matters that Unicef, the UN agency for children, reported on July 15 that Kazakhstan’s infant mortality has dropped by two-thirds since 1990.
Of course, it’s been all change in Kazakhstan since 1990 when it was a member of the Soviet Union. Back then, Nursultan Nazarbayev was chairman of the Kazakh Soviet. Almaty was the capital and the massive oil investments, funded mainly by foreign companies, were merely bare plans.
Now Kazakhstan is booming, economically, and socially.
Its public health service, though, is often derided as corrupt and inefficient so when Unicef said that infant deaths had fallen from 54 per 1,000 live births in 1990 to under 19 in 2012, it was consider something of a double success.
This is a clear boost for the Kazakh health service and, in economic terms, matches Kazakhstan’s development. That said, there is some way still to go. According to the World Bank, even the poorest country in the European Union, Bulgaria, has an infant mortality rate of roughly half that of Kazakhstan.
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(News report from Issue No. 144, published on July 22 2013)
JULY 15 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — UNICEF, the UN agency for children, said Kazakhstan is on target to hit its millennium goal of reducing infant mortality to two-thirds its 1990 rate. In 2012, infant mortality in Kazakhstan was 19 deaths per 1,000 live births, UNICEF reported.
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(News report from Issue No. 144, published on July 22 2013)
JUNE 11 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — Kazakhstan’s ministry of agriculture has declared a state of emergency in two small areas near the border with China to cull cattle infected with foot-and-mouth disease, media reported. Roughly 2,275 infected cows have been killed already this year. Outbreaks of foot-and-mouth disease occur annually in Kazakhstan.
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(News report from Issue No. 139, published on June 17 2013)
APRIL 2 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — A Russian ice-hockey star playing for a Kazakh team died after being hit in the head by an opposition player, media reported. Dmitry Uchaykin, who was playing for Pavlodar in northern Kazakhstan, died from a brain haemorrhage the day after the match. He had driven himself home but felt increasingly unwell in the night.
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(News report from Issue No. 130, published on April 5 2013)