From Deputy Chief of Mission Kathleen FitzGibbon November 26, 2014 Ebola Stops with Me. Behavior change is the key to ending the Ebola epidemic. Each of us has the power to change our behaviors that are promoting the transmission of the virus. This has been an important factor in slowing the disease in Liberia. How we take care of sick loved ones is another activity that needs adjustment because of Ebola. Stay safe while you wait. If someone is ill in the household, call 117 for help. Keep them isolated in a separate room. Only one person should be involved in care. Do not touch your loved one without protection. Ensure that they are getting liquids. Do not touch anything that they have touched. Disinfect your hands with a water and chlorine mixture. Wash your hands frequently. You can protect yourself and your family from the disease. The best way to do this is to get help for your loved one and be safe while you wait. The National Ebola Response Center is making its second round of incentive payments to health care workers this weekend via a table top exercise to finalize clean lists. During the last round, it paid 89% of those on the lists. This round, photographs will be taken and workers will confirm how they want their payments made: direct deposit, mobile money, or cash. Real workers are embracing this exercise, ghost workers and their patrons are resisting, stirring up “strikes” and/or trying to find ways to discredit this new way of doing business. When you see articles about strikes, there is a lot below the surface. First, the NERC is responsible only for incentive payments for health care workers, not salaries. United Nations Population Fund is responsible incentives for contact tracers and also ran into many problems in arriving at clean lists. Burial teams are more complicated as some are sponsored by the Ministry of Health and Sanitation, International Federation of the Red Cross, and a consortium of non-governmental organizations. Again, the payments are for incentives starting November 1, not salaries. There could be a range of causes for strikes right now, including back payment of salaries, desire to create confusion and besmirch the new system (which will cut out those who were benefiting from withholding the salaries of others), and a sense of entitlement by those not on the front-line, but see an opportunity to agitate for money. These are old behaviors that need to change. Ebola is benefiting from strikes. When surveillance workers are not doing their jobs, Ebola cases are remaining in the community. When nurses strike, patients are not getting care. When burial teams strike, highly infectious bodies are not being buried safely. Let’s all give the new system an opportunity to succeed by understanding its ultimate objective: regular hazard pay for the front-line health care workers/responders which will allow them to continue working to defeat Ebola. Ebola stops with each of us. Let’s not enable it to spread through our actions.
Posted on: Thu, 27 Nov 2014 09:01:24 +0000
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