Liberia needs 40,000 Doctors

The Internal Medicine Physician at the government-owned John F. Kennedy Medical Center in Sinkor, Monrovia has said that Liberia needs 40,000 medical doctors to enable the country gets rid of maternal deaths.

Dr. Philip Ireland said the country’s struggling 200 medical doctors lack the capacity to reduce maternal deaths here, emphasizing that 40,000 medical doctors trained in specialized areas of the medical profession will go a long way in strengthening Liberia’s health sector.

Severe weakness in the health sector was exposed by the Ebola Virus Disease outbreak across the country in 2014, which left at least 4,000 Liberians dead, including medical doctors, nurses and health workers.  He said in order to improve the health system, the government should realize or should be told that the country needs a better health system.

Dr. Ireland spoke Monday, October 5, during presentation of the Post-graduate Medicine Education of the African Federation for Emergency Medicine held in the auditorium of the Tubman National Institute of Medical Arts or TNIMA, at the John F. Kennedy Memorial Hospital in Sinkor.

He noted that other countries within the sub-region have made significant strides to eliminating maternal deaths by building the human resource capacity in their health sectors, particularly, training medical doctors.
He stressed that training of more medical doctors is critical in providing the basic health needs of the population, noting that Liberians die from kidney problem because there is no Liberian medical expert for kidney disease.

Dr. Ireland also stressed that policymakers should prioritize the health sector, which is critical in ensuring that citizens survive from illnesses, noting that Liberians should also learn to sacrifice in order to build the capacities of specialist medical doctors in the country, instead of always traveling abroad for medical attention.

By Bridgett Milton – Edited by Jonathan Browne