Health Program

PPE Arrives in Phebe

Global Health Ministries and Friends of Liberia partnered to pack and ship to Phebe a 40-foot shipping container of PPE and medical supplies. The supplies include:

disposable face masks, 10 pallets (476,500);
cloth face masks, 2 pallets (20,250);
face shields, 6 pallets (94,500);
exam gloves x-large, 4 pallets (188,000);
gowns isolation sterile, 1 pallet (4,200);
hand sanitizer, 5 pallets (4,305);
sanitizing wipes (100ct,. 10 pallets (12,000);
soap bars, 4 pallets (32,000).

Steve Grotenhuis, RPCV Zorzor 1971-72, and grandkids Xavier, Cypress, and Onyx, helped pack the container at Global Health Ministries in October 2021. The container was sent by ship to Monrovia. From Monrovia it was taken by truck to Phebe, arriving February 15. 2022.

The Liberian Health Team (see below) will help distribution the supplies to 23 schools of nursing and midwifery, and 21 hospitals and health clinics.

Covid-19 Relief Program Express Ships Oxygen Regulators

“People are dying everywhere!” was the subject of an email message received late in June. Monrovia was experiencing a sudden spike in Covid-19 cases due to the deadly Delta variant.

Angene and Jack Wilson of Lexington, KY, knew the sender wasn’t given to exaggeration. Dr. Mosoka Fallah is the internationally respected immunologist and Liberian public health leader whom they had befriended when Jack was training to be a doctor at the University of Kentucky College of Medicine. Dr. Fallah, the founder and director of Refuge Place International, was urgently asking his friends, professors and colleagues for help finding oxygen regulators. This is the piece that fits on the top of an oxygen tank to dial the flow up or down according to the patient’s need. Without regulators, oxygen tanks were going unused while many Liberians died gasping for air, according to Dr. Fallah.

The Wilsons, who were among the first Peace Corps volunteers to go to Liberia in 1962, are longtime members and supporters of Friends of Liberia. They relayed the appeal to the FOL Board, which includes several experts in medicine and public health. The biggest obstacle to responding to the need would be acquiring the right kind of regulators and then getting them to Liberia quickly without paying more for the shipping than for the needed supplies. Jack Wilson shipped a couple of types of regulators to Fallah to test whether they fit the tanks.

The FOL Development Committee reached out to Deutsche Post DHL Group in Germany, a popular express carrier in Liberia, to ask if DHL could help with shipping for a humanitarian intervention. Deutsche Post immediately referred Friends of Liberia to its U.S. division.

While the public health experts determined which regulators to buy, one of Dr. Fallah’s University of Kentucky colleagues volunteered to be the point man to receive any materials they could find. Dr. Siva K. Gandhapudi agreed to repack materials at his home in Cincinnati and get them to the local DHL office.

DHL expedited the vetting process for opening a non-profit account for Friends of Liberia and assigned account executive Amanda Bledsoe in Arizona to facilitate the process. She gave quick lessons in “dim weight” versus poundage to the team at FOL and U of K.

Through FOL members and others, 150 regulators were rushed to Cincinnati from several different sites. The first regulators reached Liberia in early July. Three shipments followed, including one of medical grade masks from FOL.

On July 31, Liberian Minister of Health, Dr. Wilhelimina Jallah and administrators of five major hospitals in Liberia ceremoniously received regulators shared by Dr. Fallah from his clinic. The Minister will see that hospitals outside of Monrovia receive what they need.

“We want to thank you all from the depth of our hearts for these donations,” wrote the author of the original email appeal, Dr. Mosoka Fallah. “It is a model to show how the U.S. goodwill can make a change in desperate times among desperate people.”

Continuing Professional Development Workshops

Background

Six masters prepared healthcare professors came together to form the FOL Liberia Health Team (LHT). A 15-member FOL US Health Team (USHT) was formed to mentor and support LHT and also to fundraise for the FOL Health Project in Liberia. The LHT conducted needs assessment surveys of a sample of faculty members in the schools of nursing and nurse midwifery and for a sample of nursing and midwifery clinicians.

Objective

The major objective of the Continuing Professional Development (CPD) Workshop for faculty of the schools of nursing and midwifery is to enhance the teaching competency of Liberian nursing and midwifery educators in delivering an evidence-based and quality teaching learning strategies and evaluation.

Helping faculty develop high-quality instruction can positively affect student learning outcomes. There are currently 17 Liberia Board of Nursing certified schools of nursing and/or midwifery in Liberia.

There is also evidence that keeping health care nursing and midwifery clinicians up-to-date and competent is a continuous challenge in today’s dynamic healthcare environment. Based on this evidence, the aim of the Clinician Professional Development Workshop is to improve the skills of practicing nurses and midwives to better meet the needs of their patients.