SIERRA LEONE: “If you are really sick you either die or go to Freetown”

FREETOWN, 7 March 2008 (IRIN) - When people come to see Dr Dominic Weellah for anything more complicated than diarrhoea or malaria he often just gives them a placebo and sends them home.

“What else can I do?” he shrugged. “People just have to find their own way.”

Weellah's clinic, in the remote centre of Sierra Leone, has no windows, just gaping holes in the walls and a rusty roof that has almost collapsed. There is no surgical equipment and a medical cabinet that is almost empty. He serves a community of over 10,000 people and the state-run clinic 17 km along unpaved roads is not much better.

“If you are really sick you either die or go to Freetown [more than 200 km west],” he said. “Even assuming patients can make it, facilities there are hardly brilliant.”

Trip to nowhere

Indeed in Freetown the hospital facilities IRIN saw were shocking. Running water in the first floor of Princess Christian Maternal Health hospital is only on for an average of one hour every day, hospital staff said – usually in the dead of night.

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