Graduate says Bougainville health needs improvement

Leonard Fong Roka

Paul Disin was born in the town of Madang in 1987 from a mixed parentage of Bougainville and Madang. He and his family moved to Bougainville, where his dad comes from Siwai in South Bougainville, in 1989 as Bougainville sunk into civil war.

Mr. Paul Disin

Since then Paul had not even met his matrilineal relatives of Madang and this does not affects him; to him, Bougainville is where he belongs.

On the 3 March, 2013, Paul was one of the 1730 students that graduated from Divine Word University; the main campus and all other affiliated campuses around PNG. He was so happy and proud that he had made it this far after all the hardship he had in his education career back in Bougainville.

‘I am very happy,’ he told me in my dormitory where I accommodated him alongside other graduates from South Bougainville, ‘and looking forward to repay my parents for the hard times they had being caring for me. And also to contribute to the development and peace building process on my island.’  

Paul actually did his secondary school at Hutjena Secondary School on the Buka Island of Bougainville from 2002 to 2005. In 2007 he enrolled the University of Papua New Guinea till 2008 doing economics and computing. But in 2009 he decided to leave UPNG and entered the Divine Word University in Madang.

In Madang he took up Bachelor Degree program in Rural Health that paves the way to be a Health Extension Officer (HEO) that is responsible in bringing the urban focused health services in PNG to the rural setting.

Before coming to Madang for his graduation he was offered a job as Residency Health Extension Officer (RHEO) at the Buka General Hospital on the Buka Island where he says he had witnessed many issues that has the potential to negatively affect Bougainville health delivery mechanism.

He said: ‘In the Buka General Hospital there is no unity in the health profession, the Residency Medical Officers (RMO) sees us the RHEO as nobodies. I feel sad working in such an environment where we are supposed to have a collective effort to bring health services to the people of Bougainville’.

To Paul, the Autonomous Bougainville Government need to really work hard to make the health services delivery mechanism proactive. He said, ‘the health care system of ABG need improvement like medical officers need short courses to get them up to date with medical development around the world. Bougainville health care does not reach much the community level but stops around the district level thus people are not so aware and left to the sting of health break downs; here it is fed to maladministration and the community suffers. Health services, for Bougainville needs to be down with the people in the rural areas’. 

For Paul and his profession, he said his studies at DWU did greatly help him and he is doing fine. But since the classroom environment is different from the hospital wards, he is still adapting.

Furthermore, he is preparing to personally monitor and collect tuberculosis (T.V) data on Bougainville with a hope to study the trends of the illness and initiate something to address the issue.

As a medical officer he as engaged on a trail with a negative starts but hopes to do better soon.

Over the course of his days at the Buka hospital a patient died before him and the incident really made him guilty. ‘It was my first week on duty and there were no professionals around in the middle of the night. The asthmatic patient was with two nurses when death crept in, I was called with diseased man was struggling to breath. I was shocked not knowing where to locate the resources to attempt resuscitating him and with the nurses who had serve for ages in the hospital only looking at me, we lost the man. I was guilty.’

Paul also saw in the Buka General Hospital few medical officers that he refers to them as ‘academic boasters’. He claims that the hospital has a New Guinean physician who recently landed on Bougainville showing off to other medical officers with his stock of degrees.

He complained to me, that ‘ABG is slack here; it should not allow such childish people to enter Bougainville. What Bougainville needs are those that are here to help Bougainville move towards its ambition, that is independence with a healthy community and population. Bougainville has enough medical professionals working in other places and it only needs to bring them in instead of letting the very people we fought and died against into our midst’.

At the graduation day he was angered by some non-Bougainvillean graduates by pestering him to secure them a job in Bougainville. ‘So many of these Papua New Guineans do not like their country, ‘he told me, ‘that’s why they run all over the place looking for jobs. We Bougainvilleans look forward to help prepare our island for nationhood but these New Guineans, are a lost people. They don’t like their provinces but they like money and that’s why the Asians are taking them over.’

After telling me his tales and dreams Paul left for Bougainville, the home he loves the most with a will to contribute to the development of Bougainville.