Mock treatment units, with fake patients are set up to train staff

Some treatment units are no more than places to die

MONROVIA: A delirious man staggers through a hospital ward, banging into walls until he is overpowered by nurses in protective suits. Trainers are using survivors of the Ebola virus to give frighteningly realistic courses to medical staff fighting the disease in Liberia.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has constructed a mock Ebola Treatment Unit where doctors, nurses and medical students, some sent by the AU, are being drilled in how to treat and deal with the dangers of the disease.

Doctors Without Borders, the medical charity that has been at the forefront of the fight against the epidemic, has insisted that training health workers is the key.

“We tell the health workers that our role here is to protect ourselves and save lives,” said Shevin Jacob, one of the WHO trainers who worked on previous Ebola outbreaks.

Training takes two weeks – three days of theory, then two days in a mock treatment unit before working for five days in a real unit under a mentor.

After the students get their certificate they are sent to the real treatment units, where mortality rates are high.

“Many are afraid. They all have lost colleagues to the disease,” said Jacob.

West Africa’s nurses and doctors had not been confronted with the virus before and did not know how to pro- tect themselves. They have paid with their lives, with more than 200 dying across the three countries.

In the “red zone” of the mock unit, where the sickest patients are treated, a woman sprawls on a filthy mattress.

Jacob explains the scenario. “It’s a woman of 24 who has been vomiting and who has diarrhoea, which has been getting worse over the past 24 hours. There is no bed for her in a medical unit. So we have to find a way to treat her.”

The carers, pouring with sweat inside their protective suits, try to calm her.

She begs for water then “vomits” all the water she was given. Ebola passes through body fluids so vomit cannot simply be wiped up.

And so the training section called “managing a sick patient when a unit is full” gives way to the part on dealing with a “confirmed case”. Then the volunteers move on to how to cope with a patient who is so confused he is banging into walls, and has convulsions.

“I decided to be part of this training because it needed to be done,” said Kobah, one of the fake patients.

“We need to improve the training units,” she added. The units are often overcrowded and under-equipped. Some are no more than places to die.

The WHO hopes to train 400 health workers in eight or 10 weeks. – Sapa-AFP