Aisha Abdurrahman lives in downtown Tripoli and when she went into labour, she and her husband lost no time driving to the nearest hospital. However, wherever the couple went, they were turned away. Each hospital they arrived at told the couple that they would not be able to admit them or deliver their baby in case there were any complications – because they had no available incubators for newborns.

 An incubator is used to provide a suitable environment when a baby is born prematurely or if the baby is ill; it’s like a life support system.

Aisha Abdurrahman lives in downtown Tripoli and when she went into labour, she and her husband lost no time driving to the nearest hospital. However, wherever the couple went, they were turned away. Each hospital they arrived at told the couple that they would not be able to admit them or deliver their baby in case there were any complications – because they had no available incubators for newborns.

 An incubator is used to provide a suitable environment when a baby is born prematurely or if the baby is ill; it’s like a life support system.

 And eventually Aisha (not her real name) was forced to give birth in her husband’s car.

 But she was luckier than Abdullah Mohammed’s wife. “My wife gave birth at the Al Jalaa Children’s Hospital but because the baby needed artificial respiration, the doctors asked us to transfer to the Tripoli Medical Centre,” Mohammed explains. There the unfortunate couple waited for hours for an incubator for their baby; their newborn died in their arms while they were waiting. “And there were dozens of similar cases waiting in the emergency department,” Mohammed notes.

 According to local medical staff, this situation is not new. It is the result of years of neglect in the Libyan medical sector, they say – the same kind of neglect that always saw Libyans travel to Tunisia if they needed decent medical treatment.

And apparently it was a mistake to send Abdullah Mohammed and his wife to the Tripoli Medical Centre (or TMC). Adel Meshri, the administrative officer on duty in the TMC’s maternity ward, said that the TMC was in no better condition than any other hospital in Libya. There were few incubators there and many of them were obsolete. Because they were used so much, often they were not sterilized properly. Additionally there was a lack of paediatricians among the hospital staff, he said. 

One of the doctors at TMC’s maternity ward, Dr Ibtissam, explained that the hospital received a lot of cases from other hospitals in the area. However, she said that the room for newborns was too small for more incubators and that the incubators there were already too close together. Currently the intensive care unit had 17 incubators in a space only meant for 12.

All of these problems have resulted in conflict with the families of babies in need. Dr Ibtissam said that she personally had been assaulted by a family who didn’t believe her when she said that all of the incubators were occupied. 

 “In many cases we have ended up putting more than one baby in an incubator,” admitted another doctor who also worked on the TMC’s maternity ward.

Libya’s Deputy Minister of Health, Adel Mohammed Abushoffa, doesn’t deny that his department has a lot of problems – this was just the general state of healthcare in Libya, he said. The former, interim health minister was well aware of the problems at Tripoli’s hospitals, he noted. But the only thing that had been possible to do so far was provide the TMC with extra incubators on a temporary basis. The long-term problem still remained.

Meanwhile, Aisha Abdurrahman, who ended up giving birth in her husband’s car, has decided to start saving: a special fund. She will use it to pay for her medical care if she gets pregnant again; she no longer trusts the Libyan state to look after her and her as-yet-unborn children.