By Allieu Sahid Tunkara
Amidst the deteriorating health situation in the country and the inability of government hospitals to respond adequately to the health needs of citizens, private clinics became a source of hope for many Sierra Leoneans. These clinics are established and run by private proprietors. They are very much relevant to the health sector as they complement government hospitals.
Apart from the private hospitals which are owned and run by private individuals, the Christian missionaries have also established hospitals in the country for a very long time .The Catholic, the United Methodist Church (UMC), the Seventh Day Adventist (SDA) are missions that have played considerable role in the improvement of the health situation in Sierra Leone. The effort of these missionaries is in line with the notion that development does not lie only in the hands of government. In their effort to augment the health system in the country, Serabu and Mattru Jong hospitals in the extreme south of Sierra Leone are owned by the UMC, Mabessaneh hospital, in Lunsar in the PortLoko district North of the country, is owned by the Catholic and Massanga hospital also in the North is owned by the SDA.
These hospitals have been helping these poor communities where they operate.
Of the three hospitals, Mabessaneh hospital in Lunsar town in the PortLoko district have been providing medical services to the people of the Lunsar community. The hospital is situated along the Makeni-Lunsar highway where people of various ailments were formerly taken to seek medical service. The hospital staff consists of mainly white Italian doctors who have been performing very well in terms of providing safe surgical and gynaecological services. The hospital has also been of tremendous help to low income earners particularly pupils of the Murialdo Secondary School and Guadalupe Secondary School as the hospital used to provide gratis service to the pupils who could not afford the medical fee.
Sarolla private hospital at the Kissy community East of Freetown has been helping the Kissy community in terms of providing medical services to the community people.
I visited the hospital at a time when the Ebola virus was spreading to every corner of the country. The hospital has a decent environment filled with mainly pregnant women who go there for safe delivery.
Mbalu Bangura is one of the few pregnant women I met at the hospital who explained that although the hospital charges were somehow expensive when compared to government hospitals, it provided quality service to its clientele.
“My husband pays Le 40, 000 for a day since I was admitted in the hospital,’’ Mbalu explained.
After a week, Mbalu delivered safely and left the hospital. Several of her colleagues also were safely delivered of their babies and returned to their houses with joy. Almost all private hospitals I have visited in the country are always well taken care of than government hospitals.
But the Ebola outbreak has affected private hospitals in many ways. Many were closed down following an order from government. The closure was owing to the suspicion that private clinics were treating Ebola suspects thereby paving the way for the rapid spread of the virus. Nurses and doctors in these hospitals went for months without salaries as they were paid from the medical fees patients pay. This structural unemployment caused by the Ebola outbreak affected the doctors and nurses in the private hospitals in many ways.
As the Ebola figures are scaling down, most of these hospitals have resumed their medical services but condition is just too difficult for them because of the number of months they have gone out of operation.
Head of Health Alert, a local civil society organisation in the country, Victor Lansana Koroma, a public health expert, narrated that one major impact of the Ebola virus on private hospitals is the conversion of most private clinics into Ebola holding and treatment centres. He said two major private clinics: the Massanga hospital in the Tonkolili district and the Mabessaneh hospital in the PortLoko district were used as Ebola treatment centres.
It is no gainsaying that the health staff of these hospitals went out of work because of the conversion of their hospitals into Ebola treatment centres. Even when most of these hospitals have resumed their medical service, they are witnessing a drastic drop in the number of patients visiting their health facilities as the fear of contracting the Ebola virus looms highly among the local populace. They always think that since the hospitals were used as Ebola treatment centres, there is a high likelihood that the virus may be still present in these private health facilities.
During the Ebola outbreak in the country, some of the nurses and doctors in the private hospitals secretly offered medical services to patients. Most of these nurses and doctors faced quarantine measures whenever it was proved that they treated an Ebola suspect. Some of the private hospital staff contracted the virus in the process of offering secret treatment and they passed away.
Even private pharmacists operating various pharmacies in the country admitted Ebola suspects in their facilities and some of them became infected. Owing to this dangerous and secret activity in these pharmacies, government issued an order for the closure of such pharmacies all over the country.
As the Ebola figures are dwindling day by day, almost all private pharmacies and hospitals have returned to their normal schedule but plagued with several problems ranging from shortage of equipment, loss of manpower, struggling with payment of backlog salaries among others. It would therefore be expedient for the government and development partners in the health sector to look into the situation of private clinics and pharmacies with renewed interest and zeal to ameliorate their status in terms of service delivery.
As it stands, government hospitals in Sierra Leone cannot adequately respond to the health needs of the growing population.
Freetown, the nation’s capital, now has a population of more than 2,000,000 (two million) people. More people will come into the city as the rural-urban migration has taken an upward trend. If the government and development partners fail in this responsibility, the country’s health system would continue to degenerate to an abysmal level.
This article was published in collaboration with Ouestaf News with the support of Osiwa
(C) Politico 15/07/15
