More than 41,000 people are living with HIV in the region today. The Ministry of Health of the Orenburg region believes that 10 palliative beds are enough for such an army of patients with a serious illness. Patients with HIV sent a collective appeal, they are extremely dissatisfied with the quality and timeliness of their medical care.
The number of people diagnosed with HIV living in the Orenburg region was usually carefully concealed by doctors and officials so as not to shock fellow countrymen. According to the state report “On the state of the sanitary and epidemiological well-being of the population in the Orenburg region in 2021”, the region is in fifth place in Russia in terms of the impact of the population with HIV infection.
The number of officially registered patients with a dangerous disease in the region exceeds 41 thousand people, and the HIV incidence rate in the Orenburg region is higher than the average for the country and the Volga Federal District. A significant number of people suffering from HIV are not on dispensary observation and do not take appropriate therapy. Recently, the number of HIV-infected people in the region has been on the rise, with people between the ages of 30 and 50 often becoming infected.
Despite the high incidence, the Orenburg region has not yet adopted a legal act regulating the interaction of responsible and interested departments and services in the fight against the spread of a dangerous disease.
Back in 2019, one of the non-profit organizations developed a draft law to prevent the spread of HIV in the Orenburg region. It provides for an integrated approach in providing medical care and social support to people with this disease, including their social adaptation and rehabilitation with the involvement of socially oriented non-profit organizations. However, this draft law is still gathering dust on the shelf.
The statistics are also appalling that more than half of the convicts serving sentences in places of deprivation of liberty in the Orenburg region suffer from socially significant diseases, and 59 percent of HIV-positive people also have hepatitis, and eight percent have tuberculosis in addition.
In a collective complaint, patients with HIV note that the reform of the healthcare system in the region has had a negative impact on the provision of palliative care to patients at advanced stages of HIV infection, while the number of infectious disease doctors treating them has sharply decreased. According to patients, the commissioning of a covid hospital in the Orenburg region led to the actual abolition of the palliative department. Orientation in recent years of regional medicine to fight the pandemic has led to a weakening of preventive measures for HIV infection.
In the Orenburg Ministry of Health, they assure that ten beds are provided for the treatment of palliative patients with HIV infection on the basis of the infectious diseases hospital, and the equipment of the boxes significantly improves the quality of medical care. Although, of course, such a number of beds for a region with 41,000 people suffering from this disease is just a drop in the ocean.
By the way, during the year the regional Ministry of Health received almost ten thousand appeals from residents of the region about the violation of their right to high-quality, effective, affordable and timely medical care. The number of dissatisfied people who were not too lazy to pump their rights to health officials is simply colossal. Maybe it’s time to take some action?
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