Ruom Collective
MULTIMEDIA PRODUCTIONS IN ASIA
Aug 04, 2019 - Yangon, Myanmar. Maternity word of the Yangon General Worker Hospital. © Nicolas Axelrod / Ruom

ILO - Universal Health Care

| Date: 2019 · Country: Myanmar, Laos & Vietnam · Video / Photography: Nicolas Axelrod · Editing: Lester Olayer · Text: Denise Hruby ·
| Additional Reporting: Marta Kasztelan · Client: ILO

 

Nicolas worked closely with the ILO to put together a series of photos, videos and testimonies about health coverage in Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam. As a team Nicolas collaborated with editor Lester Olayer and writer Denise Hruby with the help of Marta Kasztelan. The series of ten videos, 30 testimonies and images were used to promote the work of the ILO and the importance of registering for health insurance.

For seventy years, Thong Theuud had not once been to a hospital. There’s no secret to her health, she says – she led a simple life, gave birth to seven children and worked on her farm to make enough money to send them to school. But recently, she woke up in tremendous pain. Not knowing what to do, she called her children, who informed her that treatment and the hospital was free of charge.

One day in November, not long after he fed his family’s chickens, Vuong Quoc Nhat began feeling nauseated. Shortly after, he had to vomit. “Everything I ate, I just vomited,” he says. Together with his mother, he went to the hospital, where a kidney diseases was diagnosed. On his journey to recovery, he was transferred from hospital to hospital, and quickly realized that he needed to get insurance to continue his treatment.

As an obstetrician and a mother of two, See Lor says she can relate to her patients, and often feels for them, particularly if what was meant to be a simple delivery turned into a complicated surgery. „Especially if they needed a C-section, they‘d have to sell their land or cattle to pay for it,“ she says. Now, people now longer need to worry about the costs, as everyone is covered by the national health insurance.
Two months ago, Yu Mar gave birth to a beautiful baby girl. She lacks sleep, she says, because she needs to get up every couple of hours to feed the newborn and cradle her back to sleep. Being a mother is exhausting and tiring, but she radiates joy. Overall, she says, she feels blessed that she is able to take a total of 14 weeks’ maternity leave, and that she receives 300,000 kyat to cover her absence from work.