introduction
This section presents the discussion, conclusion and
recommendations of the research; the study investigated the factors affecting
women's health in Democratic Republic of Congo. The studies major respondents
were the patients from the NGO-FEPSI in Butembo District, North Kivu
province.
DISCUSSION
In the study «Factors Affecting Women's Health in
Butembo» it was expected that Women would discuss the issue of domestic
violence as one of their challenges in health, but they did not talk about it.
However, In Butembo District, we know from research (FEPSI NGO, 2007) that
domestic violence against women is worsening. There are many different reasons
why women in Butembo could not discuss this issue. First, culturally it is a
taboo for «private» issues to be discussed in public. Also, if
sexual harassment is happening in homes there is the denial that there is a
problem accompanied by the trauma which has tortured the women both physically
and psychologically. Although both men and women are equal under the law,
within communities and tribes they are not equal in strength and power. That is
why they keep silent on these issues.
As shown by the United Nations (UN) General Assembly
resolution, it is stated that violence against women violates the principles of
equality of rights and respect for human dignity. However, there is a reason
why we could not focus more on domestic violence since it was not the main
problem raised by the women. However, we know that women suffer from all
aspects of domestic violence and that these are one of the major factors, which
affect women's health in Butembo district. This can be seen by the types of
problems raised such as the preponderance of headaches and stomach pains.
Since domestic violence is a silent trauma in Butembo, women
merely talked openly of other situations or diseases which were affecting them.
As expected, malaria was top on the list because of the fact that they did not
have freedom of asking their husbands for money. This disparity on accessing
funds is also affecting women's ability to access health care and the high
numbers attending the free facilities offered by the NGO.
From NGO-FEPSI workers it was found that a big number of women
received free treatment in their clinic. However, this had somehow an impact on
women's health whereby most of them did not care much about determining their
health in the sense that few could finish taking their dose of medicine. That
is why it was discovered that the same people after a certain period were
coming back in the clinic with the same health problem, but this was not stated
in the study and is one of the reasons women were having treatment more often
than men. This continual need to come for medical care may reflect the women's
way of coping with the trauma of what they had experienced and the seeking for
physical problems may be masking the mental stress that the women are
experiencing. Post traumatic stress can cause physical symptoms, but there is
lack of sufficiently skilled health personnel to deal with this, by recognising
the mental stress rather than continue with treating the physical needs to be
addressed.
In this research «Factors affecting women's health»,
women talked of distance and transport issues which came up in their view as
one of the factors which is affecting their health just because a hospital is
far from their homes and they cannot easily go for treatment by walking a long
distance when they are feeling weak. As a suggestion, women would like the
organisations, institutions and the government to construct more hospitals to
reduce the distance and cost and to increase supplies of drugs in health
sectors, to train more health workers in order to avoid all kind of problems of
women's health in future.
| 
