good morning Hank it's Tuesday greetings from Sierra Leone and the maternal Center of Excellence so Hank this is the 48 000 square foot maternal and infant care center currently being built in Sierra Leone these are a few of the women building it and this is my crying and sweaty face as it sinks in how many lives are being helped by our little online community but let me back up eight years ago when Partners in Health began working with Sierra Leone's Ministry of Health to strengthen the Health
Care system in the Kono District the Maternity Ward at koidu government hospital did not look like this overflowing with new moms receiving excellent care with a functioning operating room and blood bank and medical residents training to be the next generation of Sierra leonean Physicians no eight years ago it looked like this dirt 4's devoid of patience due to a long history of impoverishment a horrific Civil War and the collapse of the already fragile Health Care system during the Ebola epidem
ic what's been accomplished since is remarkable Kono was the epicenter of the world's maternal mortality crisis with one in 17 women dying in childbirth or pregnancy but that's changed both maternal and child mortality have declined dramatically still the Health Care system in Kono remains inadequate there are only 41 maternal beds to serve a population of over 500 000 people so the Maternity Ward is perpetually over full and mothers and children in Kono are still dying every day for want of eme
rgency C-sections ambulance services and drugs to combat postpartum Hemorrhage it's simply not acceptable and also we don't have to accept it that's where the maternal Center of Excellence comes in with help from the nearly 40 million dollars raised by nerdfighteria and PIH over the last three and a half years this will be the world-class Health Care Center moms and kids deserve in Kono Hank it's impossible to communicate the scale of this place with a camera but Footers are being poured Tresses
are being welded plumbing and wiring is going in and the first words will hopefully open next year I sought a dumbaya the nurse Midwife who leads maternal Health at the hospital is working closely with build Health International engineer John Chu and his team to make sure that everything is right where it should be John by the way has a phenomenal Sharpie hat at the maternal Center of Excellence there will not only be excellent maternal care there will also be two neonatal intensive care units
one for babies born in the hospital another for babies born outside and brought to the hospital as well as enough operating theaters and supplies to perform up to 10 emergency C-sections every day and the mcoe will also be a teaching hospital so a new generation of midwives nurses and doctors will train there we also got to visit the site where the dormitories and staff housing will be and met some kids engaging in the time-honored cross-cultural tradition of young boys watching big machines but
but it's not only healthcare workers who are learning and being trained via the mcoe as John Chu explained to us almost all the people working on the construction site have been trained in new skills partly via classes and partly via get this educational YouTube videos we go to YouTube University on the TV 65 of the construction workers on this site are women and I got to chat with three of them including Hawa who was selling corn on the street in koidu before getting this job and who now has b
ecome an expert in reading blueprints and trains new workers on how to use tools she told me about how profoundly her life has changed but also about how she feels differently about herself they never see the construction women before Marie has also been able to learn a highly skilled trade to when they now and success after working as a Mason on the site is now a steel binder she has a theory on why so many women are working at the mcoe we know that one day we'll give back in this Hospital our
children will be coming here so that's why I will try and all efforts to build this hospital but to be clear I saw it and her team aren't waiting on buildings to improve maternal and child health more nurses and doctors are already training at the existing facilities more community health workers are being hired to identify high-risk pregnancies via house call and most astonishingly a special care baby unit at the hospital has already dramatically reduced child mortality the idea is that they sh
ould always have access to their babies and be able to to feed on-demand as needed before we visited the unit I saw it explained to us that as recently as two years ago the vast majority of these babies would have died the unit is full so so full that at times the team has to make unspeakably difficult decisions about who they can admit but the babies here receive excellent care world-class care the kind of care that every baby deserves there are many such special care baby units at hospitals ar
ound Sierra Leone but very few of them are functioning because it's not just about the building and supplying incubators it's also about the staff the training the ongoing supplies needed to run such a unit maintenance and so much more because I SATA and her team have not just the building and the incubators but also the support they need to succeed this unit is thriving and so to the thousands of you who donate monthly at pih.org Hank and John and the thousands more who've made one-time gifts t
o the people who've brought attention by sharing this project with friends and family this is the change you're making two years ago the parents of almost all of these kids kids would have gone home heartbroken but the kind of dignified high quality health care that everyone deserves is coming to Kono and with it generational change to properly support the mcoe and the larger strengthening of kono's Health Care system over the next few years we still need to raise the paltry sum of uh just over
10 million dollars so we have a long way to go if you can join the monthly donors or make a one-time gift check out pih.org Hank and John and if you're considering making a large gift we've had donations from two thousand dollars to five hundred thousand dollars please give via the special link below or email me with questions and if you can't afford to donate that's okay thank you for your attention it matters if I've learned anything from the first three and a half years of this project it is
this collectively we are much more likely to solve the problems that we pay attention to when we were in the special care baby unit partners and health co-founder Ophelia Dahl asked a nurse if one especially frail baby on a CPAP machine was likely to live all these babies are going to live the nurse responded this is the good news room I'm so proud that koidu government hospital now has a good Newsroom and with the work of Marie Hawa success and so many others on the maternal Center of Excellenc
e there is much more good news to come Hank look at what humans can do when we come together I'll see you on Friday
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