By Mustapha Kamara Jnr
Head of Sierra Leone’s Ebola Response Center, NERC, Rtd Major Paolo Conteh, has admitted to challenges in payment of frontline health workers in the ongoing fight against Ebola. There continue to be strikes for entitlements.
Addressing journalists at a conference yesterday in Freetown, the NERC boss said that he was more than ever ready, “to tackle the problem and end the disease in the country. Hazard payments and the complexities of the payment system continue to be a challenge for us in the response process, but I am more than determined to make things right”.
He said that they were going to start paying their staff on monthly basis through bank accounts and directly as the case may be.
Rtd Major Conteh commended heath workers whom he said “have been doing a risky and dangerous but great job, making sacrifices that most of us won’t make”.
He said that they would start a second phase of the “Operation Western Area Surge” next week as a way of identifying and reducing new infection cases. He said it would also be aimed at sustaining the successes that had already been achieved since the operation was launched last month.
The Ebola Virus Disease has killed over 2,000 people in Sierra Leone since its outbreak in May last year, according to government statistics.
© Politico 16/01/15
