Southern Ethiopia - Gwent Health Link

How did it start?

It all began with a few health professionals' desire to pass on their expertise for the benefit of people in Africa who so far had poor medical care.

Professor Eldryd Parry, a specialist in Tropical Medicine, who has spent many years teaching in several countries in Africa including Ethiopia , set up an independent charity called the Tropical Health and Education Trust (THET) in 1988, based in London.

THET’s motto has been to work with hospitals and healthcare training institutions in the poorest countries of the world, helping them to achieve their own goals. This is done mainly by linking them with similar organisations in the UK. Skills and knowledge are shared and staff trained to meet locally identified needs which they were previously unable to fulfill.

The First Visit

Following a request from Dr. Aberra A Gobezie, a local surgeon in Dilla, in Southern Ethiopia, two Consultant Surgeons from Nevill Hall Hospital in Abergavenny, Wales, travelled to Ethiopia with THET to teach in an emergency skills course for the student health officers in Dilla College in the spring of 2000. They were Mr. Biku Ghosh and Mr. Ian Mackie. What they found on their visit convinced them that just one visit was never going to be adequate to meet their needs.

The Link is Born

Talks with colleagues at Nevill Hall Hospital proved very productive. The Nevill Hall-Dilla Link was launched with support from THET in 2000. Support for the link has now expanded further. It includes staff from many disciplines in Nevill Hall Hospital as well as the Royal Gwent Hospital in Newport, local GPs and many people in the local community.

Only one local hospital with 50 beds, serving a population of half a million people, similar to that served by Gwent Healthcare Trust, was extremely run down. Dilla hospital had lost the confidence of the local people because of lack of even the most basic resources.

• It only opened from 9.00am to 3.30pm on weekdays.
• There was no emergency cover for even the most seriously sick people outside these hours.
• There was no blood transfusion service and no oxygen supply. Therefore, no emergency operations were performed, not even caesarean sections for obstructed labour.
• The nearest fully functional hospital was fifty miles away along a rough road.

For the local health centres serving a rural population in scattered villages the nearest hospital, Dilla, was in some cases more than 50 miles away. Seriously sick patients were referred there with hope of better treatment. But, they were often referred on to another hospital a further fifty miles away.

Due to lack of clean water, sanitation and health education in the local community, many diseases including water-borne diseases, TB, pneumonia, malaria and HIV were very common.

With no trained midwives, death of both babies and mother during delivery was very high. Maternal deaths were over one hundred times more than in UK. One out of five children did not survive to see their fifth birthday. Many of these deaths were preventable.

The link has rapidly expanded over the past 7 years and has transformed from the Dilla-Abergavenny Link to the Southern Ethiopia-Gwent Link reflecting the wider involvement on both sides of the partnership. However, our focus has always been and will continue to be the training of front-line health professionals like health officers, nurses and midwives who work in rural Ethiopia with extremely limited facilities. While we have moved our hub to Hwassa Hospital, our spokes continue to be embedded strongly in the health centres. We have had excellent support not only from health professionals both in the UK and in Ethiopia but also from organisations like THET, the WHO, British Embassy in Addis as well as the Welsh Assembly. We hope to expand our activities and collaborate with other NGOs in the region to improve health care provision in rural Ethiopia.