They are asking for suitable equipment and an increase. Nurses from Liberia’s largest hospital have gone on strike. They deplore their working conditions in the face of the Ebola virus.
Gloves, masks, boots: this protective equipment is lacking among health workers in Liberia and Sierra Leone. At the forefront of the Ebola epidemic, nurses at a hospital in Monrovia, the Liberian capital, went on strike to obtain suitable equipment to treat the disease.
“We need the right equipment to work, and to be better paid because we risk our lives,” said John Tugbeh, spokesperson for the strikers. He is a member of the staff of the John-Fitzgerald-Kennedy Hospital in Monrovia, the largest structure and the point of reference for patients infected with the Ebola virus. However, “since the start of the epidemic, we have not received any protective equipment,” he laments. “This is why so many doctors have been infected. “
Misused equipment
Since the start of the Ebola epidemic in West Africa (Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Nigeria), 10% of deaths were in effect of doctors and caregivers. If, in some cases, it is the lack of equipment that is to blame, its misuse can also be another reason. “The challenge for these trained doctors is to teach inexperienced medical staff how to use these outfits”, recently confided to why actor Dr Dieudonné Nkoghe, researcher in the Emerging Viral Diseases Unit of CIRMF. “By putting them on and taking them off in a very special way. If caregivers omit important steps, these protections may be ineffective. “
The Liberian strikers say they will not return to work until they have access to personal protective equipment. In the other country most affected by Ebola, Sierra Leone, the situation is also tense: doctors at Connaught Hospital in Freetown, the capital, also went on strike on the weekend of August 30. Their demands are the same: protective equipment adapted to this extremely contagious viral disease.
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