New Years Day
Full of ideas for innovation, potential for positivity. 2024 promises to be our biggest year so far for ELWA paediatric department.
2023 was our busiest year yet as part of ELWA hospital. There were more children through our doors than ever before, and our team pushed ahead amidst a time of many changes for ELWA hospital as a whole. It is a privilege to serve alongside a team of people who have transformed the department into Liberia’s busiest malnutrition centre and provided a beacon of hope for children throughout the country!
So here are some of our ideas for 2024:
1) We are going to invest in our staff much more! This means more focus on not only ETAT plus workshops but the follow-up work of our clinical leadership being present with our teams in the emergency room, on peds ward and in the under 5 clinic in those difficult moments.
Those moments where a child seems to be fading away and everyone is scared.
The shaky times when the treatment plan feels very unclear and there are no easy answers.
Those are the times of greatest growth.
We will be there in those moments.
2) 2024 needs to be a year of consolidation for ELWA children. 5 years ago the pediatric ward at ELWA hospital had an average bed occupancy of 10. Now we have 55 beds across the hospital completely full almost all the time, and caring for these children is complex. Every child deserves the best we can give them and we need to make sure that we have all the right staff and resources in the right places. We need to be up to date ready for every emergency which comes through the door.
That is why we will be reviewing all the hospital paediatric guidelines throughout the year to make sure that they are up to date with the current best practice, and making sure that our team are all working together.
3) In 2024 our team is going to keep growing! We are excited to have Dr Gloria Banza join us, fresh from having served in Niger at a malnutrition unit much larger than ours here at ELWA. There is so much we can learn from her years of experience and we are excited especially at how we can care for the children who come through the program in poverty much better.
4) We are going to strengthen what we do for our two busiest patient groups: malnourished children and newborns. Right now, ELWA is home to the largest malnutrition program in Liberia and we have some of the most reliable supply chains. More importantly, we have wonderful, compassionate staff! We also have very limited space for the tidal wave of newborns coming in from the many nearby facilities and we are going to explore ways of making life more comfortable for the mothers and babies as they come through.
5) We are going to work with our partners to strengthen our community focus. This will involve stronger education and support for families in areas vulnerable to malnutrition. While it is a tremendous privilege to rescue an extremely sick child from severe malnutrition, we would love to see more children thriving and no longer needing our services. This will be a long process, but with lots of us working together we can make an impact.
Please keep praying for us as we do our best to serve the children who come through ELWA hospital. We do our best with limited resources, and we don’t always win. It is extremely difficult to process when a child dies. We need your help, support and prayers every day of 2024…..