Circumstance has forced the inhabitants of Kurganka, a village in Russia’s Omsk Region, to become their own medical service. They have worked out how to give one another injections, avoiding the need for a doctor’s’ prescription. For a prescription you have to go to Muromtsevo, the district centre, 50km away – an expensive exercise and risky as well; it never rains here but it pours, literally, and even if you get though the deluge there’s no guarantee a doctor will see you. The queue starts forming at 8am, and if you’re a bit late, tough! And the bus from the outlying villages only arrives after 9am.
For a prescription you have to go the district centre, 50km away.
‘There have been so many times when I’ve arrived too late to get an appointment’, says pensioner Lyudmila Afinogenova, ‘and then you lose the whole day: the bus doesn’t go back until the evening. I gave up going there ages ago. I went just once last year with my granddaughters; the older one was starting school and the school health worker said all the children needed to have various jabs first. So off we went, taking her little two-month-old sister along as well. A friend agreed to drive us there and back, for 1,600 roubles [the average monthly pension is 10,000 roubles]. But when we got to the hospital they said we weren’t on their lists; according to their information, we’d moved out of the area. So we had to go home without the jabs.’
