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Hard to reach areas remain uncovered

Our Correspondent, Rangamati
THERE is a clear gap between urban and rural areas of Rangamati district in matters of providing reproductive health services. It is due to lack of adequate number of family planning clinics at the union level.
The scenario of reproductive health service is quite good at the town and Upazila headquarters in the district. Contraceptive prevalence rate is 65% in the district, family planning office sources said.
Maternal and infant mortality rates have dropped remarkably over the past ten years in the district. According to Mostafizur Rahman, District Civil Surgeon, Rangamati, maternal mortality rate is about 30 per lakh and infant mortality 21 per thousand live birth, whereas the national level rates are higher.
There are only seven clinics in the district town which provide reproductive health service to the people - family planning clinic. Reproductive Health Service and Training Education Programme (RHSTEP), Smiling Sun clinic, Marie
Stopes, district maternity hospital, district general hospital and safe motherhood clinic.
These clinics provide services that include registration of pregnant women, ante-natal care and post-natal care, menstrual regulation (MR), couple and birth registration, satellite health camps, uthan boithak (courtyard meeting), vasectomy, ligation, and vaccinating adolescents and women against tetanus.
RHSTEP, a national NGO, launched its programme in Rangamati about four years ago, and is now providing one-stop reproductive health services to women free of cost.
"We are also providing heath education and training and motivating people to receive services from our institution," said Barru Sarwar, accounts and admin officer of RHSTEP.
The Department of Family Planning has an acute shortage of officers and staff, which seriously hinders their reach from door to door.
Posts of medical officers in almost all ten Upazials havebeen lying vacant for long, and posts of district super, deputy director, assistant director, statistician and accountants are just void till today in the family planning department, said office sources.
"Due to lack of skills of our field staff we cannot reap the full benefit of our existing manpower," said Begum Shahan Waz, Deputy Director (in-charge) of Department of Family Planning. We need skilled people who can inform people about our services, and then people will come to our hospital or clinics to receive our services, she added.
This lack of human resources coupled with adequate health facilities creates a dire situation at the union level. As per government plan, there should be a union health and family planning centre in every union of the ten Upazilas, but in reality there are only a few of them.
Most of the union health sub-centres remain either closed for years or deserted as the doctors transferred to those areas allegedly refrain from joining their job location, depriving people from health care service.