Healthcare System in Cambodia

As you may know, Cambodia is a developing country and there are so many areas that we still have to concern about, one of which is how the current healthcare system work. Although our country government and many other organizations had invested in a lot of hard work into fulfilling the flaws we had in the system, the healthcare system in Cambodia hasn’t yet reached a level that we wanted to. Many medical centers were built in different places around the country and more people can now easily access the health services. The only problem is “health centers don’t treat people, people treat people.” Having many health centers is not enough unless there is someone there to serves their fellow citizen with quality health services.

For the first round of the school year 2018-2019, I attended a class called the Healthcare System in Cambodia which will continue in the second round as well. Our goal in this exploration round was to reach out to as many experts and organizations as possible in order to collect different perspectives on how Cambodia Healthcare System should be improved and those perspectives will act as the inspiration for each project we’ll be working on in the next round exploration.

On the first day of class, we did individual research on the different topic on questions we had related to healthcare system in Cambodia. I personally really interested in laboratory system in Cambodia, so that’s obviously the topic I did the research on. It had interested me more when I found that there was only one main lab that exists in Cambodia. Basically, in a lab, they worked on various projects: close observation of bacterias and viruses, the different type of infectious diseases, the Pentagon resistance to the current treatment.

The information I got from the research had brought up questions within me. After all the research I’ve done, I was still confused about laboratory role in the country and how those discoveries contribute to the healthcare system improvement.

Though for the next couple weeks, I took some break from the laboratory and started to get into people’s opinion on how the healthcare system should look like and what can we do to improve it. A lot of places we’d been to always mentioned the lack of human resources and high-quality types of equipment while some also mentioned doctor’s ethnicity, leadership, and hospital hygiene. However, I was looking forward to having someone mention something related to the laboratory system in Cambodia. But there hadn’t been anyone seems to interest in talking about that topic.

That is why I was inspired to work on a project related to lab research for the next round exploration. You might be wondering how is that connect to the healthcare system in Cambodia at the moment. I personally think that having a strong lab system will help to improve the healthcare system in a country. Labs and health centers work as one. Labs could do research on the effectiveness of any new treatment that is out so that we don’t have to wait for the result of the other country’s research; labs could do a research on the resistance of pathogens toward the current treatment we have and try to work out what could hospital do when they meet the patient with that certain disease or condition; lab could do a research on many more projects that could really bring a really valuable information for treatment in Cambodia hospitals. I strongly believe that labs do play an important role in improving healthcare system in our country that is why I will be working on a get-to-know-lab project and hoping that more Cambodia college students would find research field interesting and consider working in a lab as their career, more labs will be open in Cambodia, and more fund will go into the research field as well.

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