The engagement took place at the British Council auditorium at Tower Hill in Freetown and was geared towards building a resilient Health Systems in post-Ebola Sierra Leone.
According to Professor of Health Policy and System Research in the United Kingdom, Professor Susannah Mayhew the workshop aimed at presenting their preliminary findings on 3 years research program conducted in the local district, and to know national and international response during the Ebola epidemic in the Sierra Leone.
She further said that, the workshop also aimed at discussing lessons they learnt during the exercise and from understanding who made decision, when and what action to be taken and lesson they can learn for the future so that they can prepare well for any future outbreak.
According to Prof. Mayhew, she said interviews were conducted at national, international level with stakeholder representatives of the international agencies and from the government ministries that were involved in the Ebola response.
“We focused on Bo and Moyamba districts and spoke with the various district authorities, Paramount Chiefs, District Councilors among others. We also visited some villagers and chiefdom people where we were tracing infection chains through those two districts,” Prof. Mayhew said; adding that they wanted to understand how the infection spread and what action the health system took in order to respond.
Prof. Mayhew added that during their observation they learnt that some of the health workers and village communities where people were infected had no national guideline and international resources to respond to the Ebola.
Highlighting his national and international findings, Senior Lecturer School of Community Health Science at Njala University Lawrence Babawo said that after the forming of the National Ebola Response Centre in 2014 there was coordination in the response as it was in the initial start of the epidemic at a national level.
He added that internationally they observed and found out that lots of international partners brought in lots of resources which helped the country in the initial downturn of the disease.
