Govt. health center in Tubmanburg now among few most improved hospitals in Liberia

Entering the infant ward of Tubmanburg Government Hospital these days one is likely to think he’s somewhere in Maple Grove Memorial Hospital in Minnesota, USA, which is among America’s best rated hospitals. At any rate, this is more than a welcome news not only for a small rural hospital but good news too, for a nation fighting to end corruption-corruption so high and out of control that it affects national healthcare provision, all compounded by increase here in poor sanitary and medical malpractices at some health centers, a development the national media rarely feature, as Global Ekklesia reports.

By James Kokulo Fasuekoi|Editor-Publisher

The Bomi Government Hospital sits on top of hills, just few miles south of several deep iron-ore pits, left behind by foreign concessions that robbed this entire region and people of their natural mineral wealth, roughly around the 1950s and 60s. And that’s not all; the town’s proximity places it at a fairly good distance from the capital, Monrovia, and with rigorous pothole-road conditions all because of decades of total neglect by developers.

But despite all of these misfortunes, plus many more, Bomi Hospital can still boast of a clean, neat-looking, and well-equipped pediatric ward, ready to even compete with high-rated European and American healthcare centers in terms of providing patients with quality medical services and maintaining a neat and cleaned sanitary environment that meets high standards in the medical field.

A special tour of the hospital Thursday, by a team consisted of JNB Foundation senior staff (which included this writer), showed that this hospital, with its ongoing massive facelift, can now be counted among the few most improved healthcare centers lately in Liberia for its children’s ward is now lined up with incubators-on floors where there were none a few years ago before President Joseph Boakai took power.

The facelift appeared to have been massive as it covers the entire children’s ward and nearby areas such as one that host pregnant women or those going through prenatal care or catering to their pre-mature infants. Floors and walls including those of the hallways are well tiled and looked sparking clean. The kid’s ward is adorned with colorful painted pictures of sea creatures like fishes and dolphins, making it welcoming to both children and adults.

What even compliments the hospital administration’s endeavors here is the fact that they also have a standby active housekeeping staff consists of a group of mostly women who work around the clock in order to maintain higher sanitary standards, something one won’t see in many hospitals here. A group of middle-aged women were spotted, cleaning bathrooms and mopping hallways, as our tour of Tubmanburg Hospital progressed Thursday.

“This notion that a place can only be clean and up to standard when there’s a White man there is wrong; we ourselves are capable of maintaining a clean and standard environment,” stressed Mr. Henry Flanpor, Deputy Executive Director for President Joseph Boakai’s JNB Foundation’s charity, who appeared so pleased at the hospital’s new look.

For a nation such as war ravage Liberia, where corruption is totally out of control within the government working system, and with parliament who’s only interested in “milking the cow” for itself, according to one U.S. Ambassador, this sort of development is definitely good news, the good news or “change” that should be attributed in large part to Liberia’s President Boakai, and secondly, Bomi Hospital’s current chief administrator, Joseph Kanneh who’s undertaking this project with their small budget.

“President Boakai has brought donations here; the foundation [too] has brought donations,” he gleefully told us Thursday, November 20. 

Past administrations, by all accounts, did very little to rescue the country’s health sector that stood in dire need of help after two brutal civil wars in the 90s and the 2000s. As a result, healthcare in much of the country-from the main capital to the countryside-was virtually collapsing when President Boakai took power in early 2024.

Aside of hospital infrastructural development or medical equipment issues, there were also a host of other problems that most clinics and hospitals throughout the country wrestle with and still do even today; one such key issue remains the existing poor “nurses-patients” relationship at many of the health facilities. 

In some cases, for instance, nurses, and to some extent, medical doctors, have all been witnessed treating their patients without respect or courtesy, and nothing much has happened to change such behavior, per the records, even in most cases where patients have complained or given feedback.

At a medical seminar hosted here last year October, by the John F. Kennedy Hospital during which US-based medical professor and neurologist, Dr. Lawrence A. Zumo gave leading doctors a lecture in medicines, the facility’s chief medical officer Dr. John Emmanuel Tamba, urged working physicians to continue exercising “courtesy” to their patients.

“We are still getting complaints from patients,” Dr. Tamba, appointed to the post by President Boakai, told his audience.

Barely a month before the JFK Hospital seminar, this writer, while visiting a major hospital upcountry in Lofa County, heard a medical doctor tell patients that he was “tired” and would be “going home soon.” According to him he was the only “doctor” working a two-men shift on that day, and his colleague hadn’t showed up.

The individual was again heard telling an older female patient moments later: “Is it the same thing [sickness] bringing you here today?” The woman offered no answer but walked quietly into the doctor’s office and shut the door. His remarks were in total disregard to the patient’s own privacy, unaware an award-winning journalist, sat by in those hallways, just few yards away.

The rural hospital in question was heavily funded previously by a foreign Christian Mission here prior to the breakup of civil wars in Liberia. It serves as a key disease surveillance post in the region of its location.

But in spite of all this, the referenced hospital’s staffers were sending daily out-patients and visitors to the hospital’s backyard and asking patients to use the banana-cocoa and coffee bushes to defecate, while complaining “all of the toilets” were out of order, or totally shutdown because of lack of maintenance for a long period.

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