“When he was growing up in Monrovia, Lekilay Tehmeh dreamed of becoming a doctor. Even when his family was forced to flee Liberia’s civil war and became refugees in Cote d’Ivoire and Nigeria, that dream stayed at the top of his mind.
‘This has been something that had stuck with me for so long, so many years, even during exile, I still had that dream,’ Lekilay said. After his family returned to Monrovia when he was a teenager, that dream guided his path—he went on to graduate from Cuttington University with a degree in biology, and then medical school at the University of Liberia.
Lekilay’s passion for public health grew during his tenure at Liberia’s Ministry of Health, where he served in a variety of roles while also doing direct clinical care at James Davis Memorial Hospital, a maternal and child health emergency hospital. When the Ebola outbreak began in 2014, he was seconded to the Liberia Medical and Dental Council to provide technical support on infection, prevention, and control work at health facilities nationwide. During this period, he led a nationwide survey of health facilities to determine the state of infection, prevention, and control preparedness and used the results to advise the government and partners on key measures that helped improve response efforts. This work led him to pursue a Masters of Applied Science degree in patient safety & healthcare quality at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He then applied what he had learned directly at the Ministry of Health in the Quality Management Unit for two years before joining the Last Mile Health team in January 2021.”
You can read the full article on Last Mile Health’s website.