Iraq’s population growth and the strain on healthcare

Iraq’s surging population – which has now exceeded 40 million people, has correlated with a surge in demand for healthcare services, creating a strain on facilities and service providers. In Babylon, Future University College provides free dental care, including tooth extraction, filling, cleaning and implants.

The clinic offers an alternative to the poor health services in government institutions, as well as the high prices and cost in outpatient clinics. The Iraqi health system, in its present form, operates with a policy of treatment instead of prevention, that is: it waits for the disease to occur, and then begins to treat it instead of employing preventative measures.

Salem Ali, while visiting Al-Mustaqbal Civil College, says that he came after knowing the medical services for dentistry were provided there free of charge, opposed to the same services costing in excess one million Iraqi dinars in the outpatient clinic of a doctor.

While Dr. Haider Al-Rikabi, a physician specializing in emergency medicine, says that resorting to outpatient clinics is due to the decline and problems of the government health sector, while private health and educational institutions are working to provide what is better. Health services are poor, inappropriate and do not keep pace with the development taking place in the world, while now it is the opposite, despite the number of problems and obstacles related to the health sector.

The researcher in humanitarian affairs, Zahraa Sabbar, said in an interview with us.

The World Health Organization has given special importance to the issue of the efficiency of health services with minimal expenditures in effort, whether some efforts are in the form of money, manpower or other resources. In those institutions, the second aspect of the research dealt with the efficiency of these institutions for workers in the health function and their efficiency in relation to the spatial location, and the importance of strengthening those medical services within the geographical area throughout the province of Babylon.