Southern Ethiopia - Gwent Health Link

Health Centres

We have provided all the Health Centres in Gedeo and Sidama Zone with essential medical text- books in all core subject areas. Apart from these, our Link has continued to provide essential items of medical and surgical equipment for the Health Centres. CME Programme for the Health Officers working in Gedeo and Sidama Zone, in its second year has seen three workshops covering skills training in all the core subjects including surgery, resuscitation, anaesthetics, obstetrics, paediatrics, medicine, fracture and public health. Within this programme, our Link with THET has also supported attachment of the Health Officers to local hospitals for further training with the local specialists. Apart from these, we have supported local specialists visiting the Health Centres finding out about the working conditions and help with training of the health officers. The CME programme has received two year running significant financial support from the Small Grants commission of the British Embassy in Addis.

However, my impression as well as impression from my colleagues, is that the Health Officers are being moved around frequently from the Health Centres to health Desk for administrative duties. As a result Health Officers are quite often absent from the Health Centres and the actual care of the patients is being left to other staff. Although Health Centres have reasonable infrastructure, manpower and adequate supply of drugs, intravenous fluids and many surgical instruments and other equipment, they are not being properly used to their full potential.

We had a chance to discuss this with Dr Schiferaw, Head of the Regional Health SNNPN Region who also agrees with this problem. Following further discussion with Dr Aberra, our Link Co-ordinator and Dr Schiferaw, I have been able to discuss the issue of Health Officers continued professional development training with the Medical Officer for Clinical procedure in World Health Organisation. WHO has now agreed to consider supporting programmes such as ours of emergency skills training for the Health Officers. This will be with a view to developing few model Health Centres in geographically remote locations where essential emergency operations such as caesarean section, obstructed hernia, appendicectomy etc can be carried out by a properly trained team. It is hoped that an introductory visit from the WHO will be made at the end of February ’05 to take this issue forward.