By: Ilyasa Baa
After routine monitoring of the health sector in Sierra Leone recently, Health Alert has unearthed that nurses supposed to be on duty at night sometimes don’t appear for work but give tokens to those under training without qualification to take their places.
According to the Executive Director, Health Alert, Victor Lansana Koroma such practice by night shift health workers should not be encouraged noting that it has the tendency to kill patients.
He said much care is not given to patients sometimes leading to death or lack of confidence in the health system which makes people sometimes decide to try other means to get healing. “Some nurses don’t look after their patients instead they play with their phones leaving patients to cry for help in the health facilities”, Victor charged, calling on senior doctors to pay more attention and monitor the night shift religiously.
He said medical negligence should be a crime in Sierra Leone noting that stringent measures and effective monitoring should be put in place. He called for proper recording mechanism to be put in place so that defaulters are held accountable for negligence. He noted that health facilities are full of family members of patients which should not have been the case if there had been proper monitoring.
He commended government for reducing the death rate considerably noting that more needs to be done for the sector.
It could be recalled that Vice President Mohamed Juldeh Jalloh recently toured across health facilities in Freetown assuring that government has been working on short, medium and long term interventions to beef up the health sector.
