Both dire need, reasons for hope in Liberia

The woman who came into the ER didn’t have anything obviously wrong with her. Although she told the staff she thought her leg was broken, there were no bones protruding from the skin, and her leg looked relatively normal. The injury, she told them, had happened months before. First, she had tried visiting a “country doctor”—a practitioner of traditional medicine—who had subjected her leg to a regimen of daily massage. Finally, when his treatments made no difference, she came to the hospital.

Because of a power surge a month before, the hospital had been left without a functioning x-ray machine, but there was another hospital nearby that had one, and a couple of days later, they were able to transport the woman there for x-rays. They found that her leg had, indeed, been broken severely, but, because she had waited so long to come in for treatment, the bones had already begun to re-calcify at a sharp angle, requiring major surgery to repair the damage.

This is one of the many cases the Hospitals of Hope team saw in Liberia during their trip there in August. They worked primarily at John F. Kennedy Medical Center, the referral center for the entire country—which makes its lack of a functioning x-ray machine especially problematic.

While JFK was once a top-notch facility, currently only 1 of its 5 floors is in use, due to the devastation wreaked by Liberia’s civil war. While many organizations and foreign governments are working to help repair the damage, work at JFK faces several challenges.

A couple of the primary problems with re-development are the poor quality of some donations and the lack of infrastructure to receive the donations. When the Hospitals of Hope team arrived, they found that another aid organization had recently sent two sets of surgical lights—but they had neglected to include the controllers for the lights, which left these expensive pieces of equipment useless. In addition to this, our team found that the hospital did not have enough qualified staff to process all of the donations they had received—leaving many useful items stuck in storage because no one had had the time to sort through them.

We avoided these problems with the shipment we sent earlier this year by carefully considering the hospital’s needs before sending the items and by sending the team in August to install them. Our team was able to install patient monitors, ventilators, and other equipment and train the hospital staff how to use them properly. The hospital was grateful for their work, and one hospital administrator even commented that we are the first organization to send good, quality items and that, on top of that, we even came to install them.

In addition to installing equipment, the team treated patients at JFK and at another nearby hospital and completed staff training in everything from sepsis to anesthesia. This kind of work is crucial in Liberia, since many doctors fled during the civil war and many of those who remain lack training. Without sufficient doctors or proper training, patients will continue to receive poor care, no matter how many x-ray machines are available.

While this situation may seem bleak, the team was able to see improvements from last year. JFK is almost ready to open up three new patient wings, and the country's infrastructure is steadily improving. Life expectancy has increased significantly in Liberia in the years since the civil war, and it has now reached 56—still low, but climbing.

Hospitals of Hope is making a difference in Liberia, and it is your support that makes this possible. Thank you for helping to bring hope in a country that has seen so much despair.