NEWS & UPDATES


Sierra Leone: Developing future leaders


Everyone knows that Sierra Leone faces many challenges. Rachel Cooper, RCOG Director, Global Health, discusses what the medical royal colleges are doing to develop the Sierra Leonean leadership of the future.


numerous international non-governmental organisations and small and civil society organisations – ensure they’re responding to genuine need? The development project cycle is circular rather than linear, involving constant and often simultaneous phases of assessment, development, pilots, implementation and review – and it can start in many ways. The royal colleges’ project started at the beginning of 2015 with very informal discussions between staff at the RCOG, the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH) and the Royal College of Physicians (RCP). While there aren’t any active RCOG members in Sierra Leone, many UK-based RCOG members are familiar with the country and its maternal health challenges from facilitating the RCOG/Life Saving Skills course. The RCPCH has a developing relationship with the Ola During Children’s Hospital in Freetown and the RCP has been supporting the West African College of Physicians, which includes paediatricians. With this background and experience we discussed our possible contribution – how we might join up and further roll out obstetric skills and emergency paediatric triage assessment and treatment, support professional association development or focus on undergraduate or postgraduate training; through courses, short or long-term volunteers, curriculum, standards and guideline development or online learning. I then travelled to Freetown in June 2015


Steve Crump (RCPCH), Rachel Cooper (RCOG) and Augustine Kosia (Programme Manager) outside the Aberdeen Women’s Centre in Freetown


ravaged by conflict; from 2002 to 2014 it was stories of reconstruction; and then for the last 18 months it’s been all about Ebola. There have been nearly 14,000 suspected or confirmed cases and nearly 4,000 deaths,


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ierra Leone has regularly been in the news. From 1991 to 2002 it was


including 221 health workers. A small group of medical royal colleges


are now hoping to play a part in ensuring that the next stage of Sierra Leone’s history is more positive. But how does the international community – the large national and international development agencies,


for a pre-needs assessment visit. We knew that the Sierra Leonean government and the international agencies would still be preoccupied with ‘getting Ebola to zero’, but our visit provided a first chance to hear about the government’s national and health sector recovery plans, to speak to clinicians, to start mapping potential stakeholders and partners, and to test some of our assumptions. Perhaps the greatest challenge in any


project development process in a low- resource environment is to balance ‘donor’


O&G November 2015


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