In a piece in the Harvard Business Review blog, the CEO of
Ogilvy Public relations, Christopher Graves, makes the case that communication
is the key to containing the spread of Ebola in West Africa. He argues that “Whether the world’s scariest outbreak of Ebola can be managed
may come down to communications. Can governments, NGOs, and doctors communicate
with very different audiences – with accuracy, agility, and ingenuity? Can they
be convincing?”
While communication may be key in containing the
spread of Ebola, Mr. Graves misses the big picture here. It is simply that the
health infrastructure in these countries is overstretched, that even effective
communication alone cannot do the trick. To start with, the number of public
health staff in the affected countries is simply low, staff that would have
been used for the very communication that Mr. Graves argues for. The hospitals
themselves do not have any decent equipment, and the pay for the few specialized
health workers is pitifully low. When you have health workers themselves
fearing that they may be infected, and people refusing to go to hospitals
fearing that they might contact the virus while in hospital, then you know that
you have a crisis on your hands. Already, Nigeria and other countries in West
Africa, as in the rest of Africa, are facing a migration of qualified health professionals.
For instance, there are more specialist Nigerian
doctors in the West than there are in Nigeria itself. The case is no different
from Liberia, Sierra Leone, and the other affected countries.
What’s needed then is for the affected countries,
and the African countries in general, to increase the quality and training of
its health personnel. For instance, when Ethiopia realized that it couldn’t compete
with the Western countries, it increased the number of trained doctors and
nurses by four times. This had the effect of keeping the numbers of these
health professionals uniform, even after the others had left.
Still, even after the Ebola virus is contained,
African countries must increase their efforts in curbing common diseases such
as malaria, HIV, and the other communicable diseases. Currently, Africa relies
too heavily on the efforts of outsiders to curb common diseases, which is
welcome in times of crisis, but should not be the basis for long term health
infrastructure development of the continent. Otherwise, history rhymes, and African
countries will continue to have an escalation of preventable diseases.
No comments:
Post a Comment