Right to Health of Internally Displaced Persons - IDP SriLanka

curative health sector in the selected districts, the lack of medical
infrastructure and human resources have caused to minimize the service
given to the public despite of several steps by government to improve the
status of the health institutions. Especially, lack of psychiatrists and
counselors to deal with the mentally depressed people in those areas is
remarkable. Regarding the access to curative health care of IDPs
sometimes due to unavailability of transport facility to the closest health
institution, they have to walk more than 10 Km while they are not
physically well enough. Some mobile clinics stop their visits to IDP
locations soon after the resettlement or relocation underwent.
Regarding the preventive health sector, the duty is upon relevant
provincial councils to preserve the public health as per 13th Amendment
to the Constitution. However some administrative issues in preventive
health sector have resulted in public health of the IDPs to be less-touched
and sometimes they were refused to be given services. Disability of the
host district health authorities to meet the heath needs of the both IDPs
and host community, consequent to a displacement, has caused some
issues to be raised in relation to allocation of health infrastructure and
human resources. Unavailability of uniform system in allocating
community health workers has originated some anomalies in the field
and it has caused overload of works to some health workers. The
available living standards, especially regarding water, shelter, sanitation
and hygiene issues to some sets of IDPs is also questionable because
there is a lack of services providing by the relevant local authorities and
also lack of supervision by the health authorities in that regard. Though
the health authorities were able to control out-break of diseases after a
disaster, some ad-hoc cases were reported due to the inaction or improper
management of the diseases by the health worker and also due to
unhealthy practices of IDPs.
Regarding the nutritional status of the IDPs, the available dry ration
package is considered as not sufficient, especially to those depending
only on it such as Child headed families, and women headed families. In
addition, irregularities in issuing dry ration and problems regarding low
quality of dry ration given to IDPs also reported. In such a backdrop, the
nutritional status of extremely vulnerable groups such as pregnant and
lactating mothers, infants and children has gone down and the security
problems and lack of livelihood opportunities have enlarged the plight.
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