When a nurse’s death is the first sign of an Ebola outbreak, something has gone wrong. That is what happened in the Democratic Republic of Congo earlier this year and it reflects a failure the world keeps repeating. Healthcare workers face deadly pathogens without gloves, masks or the training to recognize what they’re dealing with. We would never send a firefighter into a burning building without protective gear. The same standard must apply to healthcare.
In a new essay, Resolve to Save Lives’ Chief Program Officer Amanda McClelland lays out what it actually takes to protect healthcare workers: supplies and infrastructure, just-in-time training and facility-level preparedness. In Uganda, nearly 3,000 healthcare workers completed RTSL’s free online Ebola recognition course in just four days. In South Sudan, rapid financing enabled the fastest outbreak response team deployment the Ministry of Health had ever achieved.
Every facility must have the equipment, the environment, the training and the funding to respond before a crisis hits, not after. Where governments and frontline workers have the right support, they are getting ahead of outbreaks before they spiral out of control. The tools exist. As McClelland argues in her essay, what’s missing now is the political will to use them consistently.
