Honduras: COFOA leaders secure commitment for regional hospital in Francisco Morazan Department

As sixty COFOA leaders from fifteen villages in rural northern region of Francisco Morazan Department waited patiently in front the National Ministry of Health offices, a team of five leaders negotiated with the Vice Minister of Health, Nerza Paz, about the region’s need for a hospital.  After an hour, the spokesperson for the Ministry, Doctor Javier Guevara, announced to the assembled leaders that the office had committed to significant upgrades in health service for this region – upgrading the clinic in Talanga to a regional hospital, providing needed medicines to the pharmacies, expanding the hours of service in local clinics to twelve hours a day seven days a week, and assigning eleven more nurses and twenty-two doctors to serve the region. Doctor Guevara was assigned to monitor the progress and report to COFOA leaders. The event was covered by ten media outlets.

COFOA leaders had been organizing this campaign over the past year, listening to every family in each village about their experience and visiting each local clinic to assess what service they provided. What leaders found were clinics that were poorly staffed, lacking medicine and equipment, and no capacity to deal with serious medical conditions like diabetes, cancer, and birthing complications. People in need of care had to travel hours by bus to the capitol to get care.

Holding community assemblies to discuss what the community needed and relentlessly pressing various health ministry officials for a meeting, COFOA leaders, energized by their passion for justice and the organizing process, mobilized a bus load of people to travel several hours to the Health Ministry in the Honduran capitol, Tegucigalpa, and invited the media to join them.  Health Care is a major issue in the upcoming national elections in November, so the COFOA’s timing of this action and the media attention was strategic in securing these commitments.

COFOA leaders invited the Minister of Health to join them for the ribbon cutting ceremony when the new hospital opens later this year.