Tag: Ebola
Dr Brian McCloskey CBE is the Director of Global Health Security at Public Health England and a Senior Consulting Fellow at the Chatham House Centre for Global Health Security. In this HEART Talks he introduces the HEART Reading Pack he co-authored on public health surveillance. He explains that public health surveillance is a means to… Read more
With more than 3000 deaths since the first case was confirmed in March, 2014, the international community has recognised Ebola as a public health emergency of international concern and a clear threat to global health security. It is the subject of a high-level UN Security Council resolution, and has triggered the creation of a UN… Read more
Dr Haja Wurie is based at the College of Medicine and Allied Health Sciences in Freetown, Sierra Leone. In this HEART talks video she describes the rebuilding of health systems in the post-conflict period in Sierra Leone as ‘fire-fighting’. This meant that the response did not adequately capture gender. Ensuring service provision for women and… Read more
The current Ebola outbreak is concentrated in Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea: countries with limited state capacity which are recovering from political instability and conflict. The indirect consequences of the Ebola epidemic and its disruption of public and private services threaten the lives and livelihoods of more than 22 million people in Ebola-affected areas. As… Read more
This spring, when my team from the Ebola Response Anthropology Platform evaluated Community-Based Ebola Care Centres (CCCs) in Sierra Leone, one thing we constantly heard complaints about was human-resource management. Residents of the communities where the Centres were located grumbled about favouritism: well-paying jobs in the Centres were given to friends and family of the… Read more
The already weak health care delivery sector in Sierra Leone has been further overburdened with the Ebola outbreak. All efforts made towards strengthening the health system and working towards providing equitable access to healthcare for all has suffered a major setback. The Ebola outbreak has further highlighted the gaps in the health system namely lack… Read more
Diseases such as Ebola highlight the importance of a holistic focus on health systems, as opposed to assuming that health is the preserve and concern of health professionals alone. This was the lesson Uganda learnt very quickly in managing the Ebola outbreak in 2001. Until the current epidemic in West Africa, Uganda held the unfortunate… Read more
In this presentation David Peters, from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, discusses how lesson learning from responses to the recent ebola outbreak in West Africa can strengthen health systems. His presentation focuses on strengthening national health systems, rather than at the international level. The outbreak has caused over 10,000 deaths. In addition, the epidemic has caused fear… Read more
What initially was perceived to be a self-limited outbreak of Ebola virus disease in a forested area of Guinea has become an unprecedented epidemic of international concern that continues to spread unabated in parts of west Africa. A lack of public health infrastructure together with delays in virus detection and implementation of control interventions have contributed… Read more
This correspondence from the WHO Ebola Response Team focuses on the West African ebola epidemic after one year. It explains how the uneven success of ebola control measures to date, in the face of shifting geographic patterns of transmission, illustrates the continuing threat posed by the Ebola virus 1 year after the start of the epidemic. A total… Read more
The recent call for more of a focus on people centred health systems and the devastating effects of Ebola in West Africa have brought communities to the forefront of the attention of decision makers. REACHOUT, along with our sister consortia ReBUILD and COUNTDOWN, are part of a growing group of health systems researchers who are trying to provide… Read more