St. John of God Catholic Hospital

St. John of God Hospital

Today another doctor showed me how patients were being safely triaged at St. John of God Hospital in Lunsar.  The triaging area has been carefully partitioned into safe area and red zone and patient and staff flow is carefully drawn out so that the traffic is always in the direction of clean to contaminated areas.  Staff is either in scrubs, partial or full PPE according to where they are working.  There are designated rooms for wet, dry and pregnant women, all very organized and carefully thought out.  The patients who are deemed to go to the ETC will be shepherded through a separate gate where the ambulance waits.  There are also areas for donning and doffing.  As always the bottoms of our shoes had to be sprayed with 0.5% chlorine and we washed our hands with 0.05% chlorine.

When we arrived, we learned that the hospital does not open for triaging on Sundays.  However it continues to see emergency cases which will require triaging if the patients do come in, so I stayed on.

The Inpatient Ward

St. John of God triages around 30 to 40 patients a day.  Any suspected patients for Ebola are then sent to the ETC.  The hospital outpatient department is open six days a week.  The inpatient is still not open yet because of a lack of staff and patients are still afraid to come to be seen but today they had a surgical case, a pregnant woman who arrived with her baby dead in utero.  A C-section had been performed.  The hospital is painted in two different shades of green, quite pleasing to the eyes.  This was where 69-year old Brother Manuel García Viejo, the hospital medical director contracted Ebola and died in Spain. 

All was quiet in the hospital ground except for a few dogs making a cool spot in the dirt for a long nap as the heat built up.  Near the hospital canteen, several young women were cooking outdoors in several big pots; a delicious concoction of onions, peppers in a curry sauce and rice.  One of them told me that for 20,000 Le, I could have lunch whenever I come to St. John.

Just before mid-afternoon, a young man with some broken bones in the leg came in an ambulance, he had x-ray done in Makeni and requested to be driven to Port Loko Hospital.  Practically no one else showed as Sundays are not OPD day.