After Ebola, Liberia’s Health System on Path to Recovery

Shirley Kamara, 37, an expectant mother, smiled as she received medical care at C.H. Rennie Hospital in Kakata, just over 40 miles (68 km) north of Monrovia. “Our hospital is far better now since the Ebola outbreak,” she said. “We are encouraging our people to come here because everything is getting better.”

C.H. Rennie Hospital in Liberia’s Margibi County was one of the facilities hardest-hit during the Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) outbreak in 2014; 14 of its health workers died. But, as a result of the international attention the crisis attracted, health care services have since improved, according to Dr. Asinya Magnus: “Ebola revolutionized health services in Margibi,” he said recently, “with a transition from a closed to an open health care system.” The health system’s new infrastructure is more decentralized, and health workers receive both more medical supplies and training in Infection Prevention Control procedures.

The Ebola outbreak exposed the weaknesses in Liberia’s health care delivery services, already greatly incapacitated by the time the World Bank and other development partners intervened in it in September 2014. The dilapidated state of the country’s public health care included everything from inadequately qualified health practitioners and poorly equipped medical facilities, to the lack of infection control measures...