[Women's health and the cooperation of Canadian voluntary medical relief workers in Afghanistan].

Canadians are increasingly being asked to become involved in international health research and intervention projects. Recently, Quebec clinicians were asked to support a project to build and run a tertiary and highly-specialized hospital for women and children, in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan. The goal of this paper was to analyze the challenges raised by participation in such a project. The major lesson learned was the need to resist the temptation to provide aid when it involves an attractive but ineffective intervention. The current public health priority in Afghanistan is to provide as much of the population as possible with access to a nearby health centre, for primary health care and safe deliveries. When analyzing the implications of Canadian clinicians' commitment to this project, we considered three major public health challenges: public health priorities, hospital care organization and health care financing. The results indicated that, given the current Afghani context, this project was neither relevant nor appropriate and had undesirable repercussions on the population and the health care system.