Tories ask health workers to join Ebola fight
While her friends and family celebrate Christmas in Canada, Ottawa’s Lindsay Jones will be at the epicentre of the Ebola crisis, offering support to those who have been touched by the deadliest outbreak of the virus in history.
The timing is deliberate. The 33-year-old, who works as a social worker at the South-East Ottawa Community Health Centre, knew Christmas would be a difficult time for the Canadian Red Cross to find recruits to go to West Africa, especially people with young children, so she took a leave from work and volunteered. She will be based in an Ebola treatment centre in Sierra Leone as a psychosocial worker.
Federal Health Minister Rona Ambrose hopes other Canadians feel the same way.
Ambrose launched a major recruitment drive Thursday to encourage health workers and others to volunteer with the Canadian Red Cross in West Africa.
“Today, I am issuing a call to action to Canadian health-care workers to travel to West Africa to care for Ebola patients in Ebola treatment centres in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea,” Ambrose said in an announcement at The Ottawa Hospital’s Civic campus.
Ambrose said evacuation plans are now in place if any Canadian health workers need to be brought home. Last month she said Canada wouldn’t send personnel to Ebola-affected countries until it had a solid evacuation plan.
The federal government is recommending eight-week rotations, including three weeks in isolation at home.
“We didn’t feel it was respon- sible for us to be encouraging people to go to West Africa until we felt very comfortable with the medical-evacuation options for Canadians. We feel comfortable with that now.”
Earlier, Ambrose, Defence Minister Rob Nicholson and Canada’s chief public health officer, Dr. Gregory Taylor, watched a demonstration of the meticulous technique needed to remove the personal protective equipment required by Ebola workers.
In addition to encouraging volunteering by Canadian health workers and specialists — such as water and sanitation engineers, psycho-social support workers and infectioncontrol experts — the federal gov- ernment announced $20.9 million in new funding for nine humanitarian organizations working in the West African Ebola crisis. The money will go toward treatment, training activities and support.
Nicholson announced that the federal government would send up to 40 military health-care workers to a special clinic in Sierra Leone that treats local and international health-care workers who have been exposed to the Ebola virus. They will work with military health-care and support staff from Britain.
Canada has committed $113.5 million to the fight against Ebola, including more than $20 million to the World Health Organization, $10 million to UNICEF and smaller amounts to the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, Médecins sans Frontières and other organizations.
Canada, which developed one of the promising experimental vaccines against Ebola, has also invested $23.5 million for further research and development of Ebola countermeasures. Canada donated 800 doses of the experimental vaccine to the WHO. They are being used for Phase 1 clinical trials.
The Canadian Red Cross, which has sent 17 workers so far, is aiming for more than 150 recruits. To encourage qualified public servants to volunteer, the federal government will provide full pay and benefits during deployment, Ambrose said. She encouraged provinces and territories to take similar action with their public-sector workers.
Lindsay Jones has been preparing her whole life for just such an opportunity.
Her experience as a social worker is similar to what she’ll be doing in Sierra Leone, and she has studied international development. Jones has also travelled to Africa several times, and her master’s thesis, on girl soldiers, was based on Sierra Leone, although she hasn’t been there.
As a psycho-social support worker, her job at the treatment centre will be to help recovering patients reintegrate into society and support those who have lost family members. Despite the risk, she’s confident in the safety measures and protocols the Red Cross has put in place.
She said she’s both nervous and excited, but feels lucky to be able to go.
“I hope to be able to come back and feel like we made a difference. I am confident that we will.”