One of our correspondents in Freetown, Bai-Bai Sesay, recently had a chat with Sierra Leone’s only psychiatric doctor, Edward Nahim, on the training of medical students, nurses and others health workers in the field of Psychiatry and wrote the following story. Here we go:
The Barnet, Enfield and Haringay Mental Health Trust, NHS Trust of North London, a group of psychiatric hospitals during the last ten years developed a twinning programme with the Sierra Leone Psychiatric Hospital at Kissy to help teach psychiatry to the auxiliary nurses working in the hospital.
Clinical psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers and psychiatric nurses come to Sierra Leone once a year to teach psychiatry to some of the health workers at the Psychiatric Hospital at Kissy(formerly known as Kissy Mental Home) and others working in the out patient clinic in central Freetown during the last eight years.
Psychiatry is a course requirement for students at the College of Medicine and Allied Health Sciences in Sierra Leone. Dr. Edward Nahim, a consultant psychiatrist has been teaching psychiatry to these students during the last twenty years, and fortunately, Dr. Ros Furlon, a consultant psychiatrist, Prof. David Winter, a psychologist also come to teach to these medical students once a year in Freetown.
One medical student was sponsored to go to the U.K for his elective training in psychiatry and four mental health workers from Sierra Leone also went to London for three week refresher courses.
Sponsorship for these programmes is by Barnet, Enfield and Haringay mental health workers, the British High Commission in Freetown and some philanthropic organizations. There are plans to start training mental health workers in other institutions in the provincial towns in Makeni and Bo.
Psychiatric illness is on the increase in Sierra Leone. A WHO survey conducted five years ago demonstrated that 400,000 people suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Schizophrenia, Depression, Epilepsy, Mental Subnormality of Intelligence and Drug Abuse which is responsible for about 80% of all admissions to the psychiatric hospital.
Mental Health workers are very few in Sierra Leone with only one psychiatrist, two psychiatric nurses, some social workers and counsellors. There is a desperate need for more mental health workers in Sierra Leone but it is extremely difficult to recruit students into psychiatry which is frowned upon and stigmatised in all African countries.
Photo: Group photograph of students with Dr. Nahim(standing fourth from right) and British instructors.
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