Woman patient in the Tariat Hospital
The hospital, where our project is located, is in the soum or district called Tariat. There are about 15 to 20 soums in each province of Mongolia. Tariat sits at about 6,700 feet (2,042 meters) and is located in the second coldest part of Mongolia, about 670 kilometers from the capital of the country, Ulaanbaator. Temperatures often exceed –40 degrees Fahrenheit (-40 degrees Celcius) in winter. There are about 3,000 people who live in the town of Tariat but the hospital there serves about 30,000 people on an annual basis, most of them coming from neighboring soums.
The hospital was built by the Russians in the 1960’s and is in a horrible state of disrepair. The equipment is outdated and much of it non-functioning as it was also furnished in the 1960s. The hospital has a competent, dedicated and well-trained staff of 5 Doctors, 8 Assistant Doctors, 7 Nurses, 4 Specialized doctors including a Lab Technician, and a number of cleaners and other support help. Last year, in addition to having over 30,000 patient visits, the hospital performed 192 operations and housed over 1,000 in-patients. Unfortunately, there are no patients in the hospital approximately ¼ of the time because there are no medicines, bandages, needles, lab supplies and even heat, because of a lack of funds.
To enable the hospital to serve the desperately poor people of the region year round, The Denan Project has been providing sufficient medicines, lab supplies, needles, bandages and funds for heat since December 2011.
