Tuesday 14th November Part 1

We began the day with a visit to the Deputy Minister of Health where I met Dr Guize, the National Eyecare Coordinator. He spoke a lot about the problems of lack of equipment nationwide. The Deputy Minister also spoke about setting up a national secretariat for recruitment, which should help with the issue of ‘skipping’, (see post of Monday 13th) and about the need to de-centralise river blindness control to the districts and ensure it became more integrated with eye-care.

Following this meeting, we were very privileged to be given an audience with the President, Dr Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. We had a very positive meeting with her – not just an introduction. She too was very keen on our focus on the south east, and offered to help in any way she could, particularly with the problem of keeping trained people in the country.

We went from the President to visit JFK hospital – the main referral hospital in Monrovia. The eye clinic here is run by Dr Guize. He was right in saying that there was very little equipment there. The ground floor building was reasonably spacious, with enough consulting rooms, and there were several nurses. Half of the eye clinic was occupied by Chinese opthalmologists, although they had gone for the day and padlocked all their rooms, so we could not see what equipment they had. Dr Guize said he was able to use their operating theatre once a week.