Sanniquellie, Nimba County – A dark cloud of imminent collapse, of its diagnostic capabilities, hangs over postwar Liberia’s unarguably best hospital, Jackson F. Doe Memorial Referral Hospital, according to veteran Liberian Photojournalist, Sando Moore.
Moore, the Publisher of the acclaimed Sando Moore Images Magazine, recently visited the hospital in Tappita, Nimba County, where he observed that several of the hospital’s instruments and equipment are broken down, adding that if care is not urgently taken to repair or replace these wrecked machines, the hospital risks total collapse.
The Jackson F. Doe Memorial Referral Hospital was inaugurated on 12 February 2011, as a gift from the People’s Republic of China to Liberia, with the facility being fully equipped to the standards of any modern health facility elsewhere on the globe.
But Moore says about five years on, trepidations are rife that challenges at the China-aided health facility suggest that if care is not taken urgently to address the growing problems of wrecked instruments and equipment being faced by the country’s only exceptional rural referral hospital, the Chinese gift to their Liberian friends would cascade to the bottom of the dustbin of history, as an institution that started well, as far as health care delivery to Liberians is concerned, but equally quickly fell by the wayside.
According to the Liberian photojournalist, Jackson F. Doe Memorial Referral Hospital’s Chief Executive Officer and Medical Director, Dr. Lawrence M. Sherman, confirmed to him (Moore) in a recent interview that the hospital’s CT-scan machine, which is very vital to conducting in-depth diagnosis, has been down for well over two years now.
To get the CT-scan machine, the only one in the whole country, up and running again, it will cost some US$200,000 for repair works to be carried out on the machine, which many Liberians, who cannot afford the fortune of seeking medical attention abroad more or less depended on for in-depth medical diagnosis prior to its collapse.
Moore also observed that the hospital’s mammogram machine used for breast cancer screening and for breast cancer diagnosis has broken down for almost two years. One of the three generators the hospital relies on for constant power supply to the institution is totally in shambles, while the others require routine repair almost weekly, according to Moore.
The magazine publisher added that the wind of wreckage blowing across the Jackson F. Doe Memorial Referral Hospital has not spared the hospital’s laboratory, with most of the clinical machines, including the chemistry machine and blood machine, in the once well-equipped laboratory being grounded for some times now due to break down.
Dr. Sherman, according to Moore, stressed the need to urgently repair or source funding to replace the hospital’s blood machine with a new one, without which, he said, it is practically impossible for more detailed blood investigation to be conducted at the Jackson F. Doe Memorial Referral Hospital.
Howbeit, Moore maintained that investigation conducted by him revealed that most instruments and equipment of the hospital have run into serious mechanical problems and are already worn-out, having been repaired repeatedly, such machines are now at the phase that repairing is no longer an option.
Jackson F. Doe Memorial Referral Hospital, the only referral health institution in the country with almost a dozen of expatriate doctors, including professional health practitioners specialized in Pathology, Anesthesiology, Radiology, among others, receives less than US$3 million from central government as budgetary allocation for the upkeep of the hospital.
Moore says for a health facility of such remarkable reputation as the Jackson F. Doe Memorial Referral Hospital to keep providing sustainable and enhanced health services, Government’s funding of less than US$3 million is a drop in the ocean.
“With a budget of less than three million, you cannot maintain such a major hospital with eight expatriates – the only hospital [in the country] with specialists in Pathology and Anesthesiology.”
He intoned that the hospital medical team comprising a Pathologist, Anesthesiologist, Histo-technician, Obstetrician and Gynecologist, General Surgeon, Pediatrician and Internist are being paid from the institution’s US$3 million budgetary allocation.
He pleaded that although Government has been trying to maintain the Jackson F. Doe Memorial Referral Hospital through budgetary allocation in the tone of US$3 million, there is a need for the GoL and its partners to urgently assist the hospital with increased funding.
Moore, who sees the Jackson F. Doe Memorial Referral Hospital as a glowing legacy of the Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf regime, pointed out that in order to maintain such legacy, pumping in more funding for the sustenance of the hospital is of urgent and paramount essence, indicating that it was therefore paramount to maintain such legacy, all hands must be placed on deck aimed at sourcing more funding so that the basic things at the institution are maintained and for sustainability to continue.
The Liberian journalist is not alone in his plea for increased funding to the hospital. When contacted, the former Medical Director of the Jackson F. Doe Memorial Referral Hospital, now Deputy Minister of Health and Liberia’s Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Francis Kerteh, said to sustain the hospital, it would require “good budgetary allocation.”
Dr. Kerteh, who corroborated Moore’s assertions that several machines at the Jackson F. Doe Memorial Referral Hospital are in ruins, noted that erecting a structure such as the one housing the hospital and equipping it as a hospital, seems to be the easiest part, but opined that “the most difficult is maintenance and sustainability – and these aspects of it, require funding – good budgetary allocation.”
However, the Chief Medical Officer of Liberia disclosed that Government and its partners are making strides to abridge the difficulties being experienced at the JFD Hospital.
Meanwhile, journalist Moore has warned that failure to heed calls for increased funding to the hospital would spell doom for the survivability of the institution which cost the Chinese some hefty sum of money and drained the sacrifices of several persons, including now deceased John N.T. Strother, who made the life-saving decision of donating 50 acres of land for the construction of a regional health facility that has to date not only provided services to Liberians and those residing in the country, but to Guineans and other citizens from other countries in the sub-region.
