Sierra Leone

A special World Pneumonia Day report: Sierra Leone’s fight to improve healthcare

Nov 12th, 2010 9:15 PM UTC
By His Excellency Mr. Edward Turay

For World Pneumonia Day this year I am speaking at the flagship UK event, which is being held in the Houses of Parliament. I will be speaking in front of an audience of parliamentarians, Government representatives, leading NGOs and other interested parties and I am proud that I will be able to relay to them the story of Sierra Leone’s progress in fighting terrible diseases such as pneumonia, the leading killer of children worldwide.

In the recent past Sierra Leone has had some turbulence, including political instability and conflict. This was reflected in our healthcare outcomes. Back in the year 2000, during the Civil War, maternal mortality stood at 1,300 deaths per 100,000 and child mortality stood at 252 deaths per 1,000. These are staggering figures, which suggested a bleak future for my country.

But we have spent the last few years building political stability and moving forward. One of the key strands of our redevelopment has been investment in healthcare. Since the year 2000 total expenditure on health as a percentage of gross domestic product has increased by 17% and per capita government spending on healthcare has doubled since 1995.

Our current President, Ernest Bai Koroma, is particularly strident in improving healthcare outcomes. Last April he launched the Free Health Care Services for Pregnant and Lactating Women and Young Children strategy. This has had some impressive initial results. The numbers of children and mothers seeking medical health has doubled and the use of anti-malarial drugs for children has increased by over 372%.

We are striding forward and our maternal and child mortality rates have fallen by an impressive 31% and 23% respectively.

But we do face significant challenges going forward.

Pneumonia is one of these challenges.

Each year this terrible disease claims the lives of 8,500 children in Sierra Leone, that is 23 children every day. Together pneumonia and diarrhoea account for an estimated 40% of all child deaths.

But we are taking this dreadful disease on. We rolled out the Hib vaccine recently, which protects against one of the major causes of pneumonia and next year we will roll out the pneumococcal vaccine, which will help to protect children against the leading cause of pneumonia.

This has been made possible through our determination and through the support of organisations such as the GAVI Alliance, who are helping us to roll out the pneumococcal vaccine next year as well as supporting us through recent years. We are also indebted to the work of a number of other key organisations like the ONE Campaign.

So on the occasion of World Pneumonia Day I am proud to say that Sierra Leone is a country on the move and next World Pneumonia Day I hope to be able to report even further progress in tackling devastating diseases such as pneumonia.

His Excellency Mr Edward Turay is High Commissioner for Sierra Leone in the UK. He has held the position since the beginning of this year and was previously a leading politician for the ruling ACP party in Sierra Leone.

For more information please see:

Sierra Leone High Commission in UK
World Pneumonia Day

Birth & Death in Sierra Leone

Oct 13th, 2008 12:13 PM UTC
By Nora Coghlan

The plight of mothers in Sierra Leone graced the cover of yesterday’s Washington Post. Sierra Leone is home to the world’s highest maternal mortality rate: mothers face a 1 in 8 chance of dying in childbirth. This is compared to 1 in 4,800 in the United States and 1 in 20 in the rest of sub-Saharan Africa.

The story of Saio Marah highlights some of the factors behind these high mortality rates. Marah arrived at the hospital by motorbike, the predominant mode of transport in the rural Sierra Leone. She is examined by Dr. Konteh (an ophthalmologist by training), who informs that her that she had waited too long to come to the hospital: the baby’s heart rate is too fast and she needs an emergency caesarian section. But all of the surgical nurses had gone home and the operation will have to wait until the team can track its way back to the hospital.

The article continues:

It was a Monday evening, and her husband, Mohamed Barrie, said she had gone into labor on Saturday. Both of them were worried about the expense of going to the hospital, he said, and were sure she could deliver easily enough without assistance from hospital doctors. So they had gone to a neighborhood clinic where a nurse examined her and sent her home. Now she was three centimeters dilated, her water had broken and she had finally come to the only hospital in Koinadugu, a sprawling and rural expanse in the far northeastern corner of this West African nation.

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