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A young woman lies in intensive care at Liberia’s Phebe Hospital. Her mother comes running in with the drugs she needs, but the doctor shakes his head. It is too late.
“When patients come, we are obliged to send (family members) out to get drugs. Sometimes by the time they get back (the) patients are dead,” laments Dr Jefferson Sibley, the hospital’s medical director.
“People are dying in front of our eyes, and we cannot do anything.”
Battered by years of civil war and then in 2014-16 by the worst Ebola epidemic in history, Liberia’s health sector is on its knees.
The crumbling infrastructure lacks almost everything — medicine, beds, equipment, ambulances, even a reliable electricity supply.
Phebe, in central Bong county, is the second largest hospital in Liberia, with 200 beds and seven doctors on its staff.
Despite chronic shortages, it still manages to treat at least 2,500 patients every month.
“We are supposed to get supplies from the ministry of health and the National Drug Services (NDS) but we haven’t received supplies for almost a year,” Sibley said. “We can’t do anything about it.”
Malaria was the cause of death of the woman in the intensive care unit. She was 25.
According to the World Health Organization, total health expenditure per person per year is about $100 (87 euros) in Liberia, among the lowest in the world.
There is fewer than one regional or district hospital per 100,000 people in the country of about 4.7 million.
In 2010, according to the latest available data, there were eight hospital beds per 10,000 people.
In Jenepeleta, a village 30 kilometres from the hospital in Phebe, Regina Kollie, 45, is trying to lower the fever of the youngest of her five children, a four-year-old girl. Like many in the region, Regina sought help in traditional medicine and gathered leaves with which to wash her daughter, following the advice of a healer.
The treatment is not working and the child’s fever has raged for days. But going to the hospital is not an option.
“I don’t have the money to take my daughter to Phebe. The ambulance used to help us in these cases, but we don’t see it any more,” Regina says, weeping.
“The two ambulances we had are broken down,” Sibley confirmed, noting the vehicles had been “instrumental when it comes to saving lives”. — AFP
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