Each person comes to this world with a goal

Nurkhan works as a family doctor at the Family Medicine Center, there are days when up to 40 patients turn to her for help. According to Nurkhan, her medical career began long before the institute. When she was 11 years, Nurkhan lost her mother, who had oncology. Nurkhan always felt and saw how hard it was for her mother:

“When my Mom was sick, we were inviting a nurse from the neighboring village. All the time I wanted to make injections myself to relieve my mother from pain. That is when I decided to become a doctor and help people. My mother also was a medical worker, and I wanted to be like her”.

Years passed and Nurkhan entered the medical institute, successfully graduated and has been working for more than 30 years in the healthcare system. For some time she has been the deputy director of FMC, but later decided that administrative work was not for her, as she always wanted to work with people, treat her patients and help them.

When the coronavirus outbreak happened in the country, Nurkhan became one of the first doctors to come face to face with the infection.

“The most difficult were days and weeks when we had to live in our Family Medicine Centre away from our families, from our children, grandchildren and spouses. There were days when we simply had no time to speak to them on the phone. For 28 days we lived side by side with our colleagues, got to know each other better and were so united that we became almost as close as brothers and sisters”.

During the first weeks, many colleagues were desperate, they had to overcome many challenges, but it is common knowledge that medical workers are never desperate, Nurkhan laughs. These days will also pass, patients will forget that they were sick, and officials will forget their promises, this is our profession, we chose this path ourselves.

As Nurkhan says, the coronavirus has not put an end to other diseases and people are still suffering from other infections and sicknesses. There is HIV infection, for example: we never forgot about our patients with HIV because they were in the risk group. In our multidisciplinary team we created a group in whatsapp, our social worker consulted our patients on psychological issues and we tried to organize humanitarian aid, delivered food packages to PLHIV badly in need. Jointly with food, we provided ARV medicines to our patients.

Nurhan is used to thinking positively and tells us that one should live in joy:

“Each person comes to this world with a certain purpose. Some people want to be rich and successful, and some want to live in a big and friendly family. And we doctors have our own goal - to treat our patients and help people. I hope that these days many people have appreciated the work of medical workers and we have learned a lot from each other, well, at least, to constantly wash our hands”.

UNAIDS assists medical workers in the pilot multi-disciplinary teams through “Araket Plus” Public Foundation within the frame of the Russian Program of Technical Assistance to Eastern Europe and Central Asia to combat HIV/AIDS and other infectious diseases. 130 families living with HIV will receive food packages in the total amount of KGS 690 000 within 3 months.