I have for the past few days been in Greenville in the south of Liberia. This small town  has experienced several Ebola-cases. MSB has set up a rapid response ETU that has taken care of Ebola patients. The medical care of the patients has been done by local medical personnel and the MSB-personnel has been in a support and coaching-role. At the moment there are no patients at the ETU. When talking with the local medical staff, the challenges becomes evident, that these fantastic people are facing when working in PPEs taking care of the Ebola-patients, having in mind the temperature and risks in relation to the wage.

The other day, we visited a small village that has had several Ebola-cases. Together with health and psycho-social personnel for the Greenville hospital, we participated in a meeting with the people in the village to inform and discuss about the intervention. The intervention has been successful and the village does not have any more Ebola-cases. There is still monitoring activities in place to follow up on individuals that have had contact with those that were sick. The visit gave important insights into the amazing work done by the health teams and the work by the local community in their fight against Ebola.

It seems as there are challenges for the international community in channeling the material and personnel capacity that exists in the Monrovia area to ensure and build up capacity on a district-level and community-level where the frontline battle against Ebola is taking place. This is not a surprising observation since in all natural- or health-disasters, the coordination of resources is complex. But when observing the small means that these local health teams are working with, one also realizes that coordination in general should perhaps be given an even stronger attention as well as support.

// Greenville, 4th of January