top of page
  • White Facebook Icon
  • White Instagram Icon

Health Factors and Dieases

Occupational, environmental, nutritional, and unintentional injuries all make a huge impact in health. Some more than others but they all are huge factors that should be closely observed. Occupational injury is an injury that happened at work or was caused by any action that was performed to get the job done. Environmental injury is any injury caused by an environmental destruction, for example any injuries from the aftermath of a tornado. Nutritional injury is an injury caused by your diet and what you consume. Lastly, unintentional injuries are injuries that occur unexpected and by accident.

Common Factors in Sierra Leone

Common health factors that occur in Sierra Leone are environmental and nutritional. Environmental was a huge factor because of the Civil War. Although this was not an injury caused by any weather related mishap, this could still be considered as an environmental injury because it was war in the whole country where many people are being killed. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the Civil War destroyed Sierra Leone's Health Systems. During the war, clinics were burned down in the country. This however put thousands of lifes at risk because people could not receive the healthcare they needed. In addition, the Civil War caused many people to move to main cities which vastly increased the numbers of people getting sick due to sanitation problems (WHO, 2010). This was a very huge factor that put Sierra Leone’s health in danger. 

 

Nutritional injuries is one of the leading causes of deaths in Sierra Leone. Cardiovascular disease and diabetes kills many people there. These diseases are both caused by poor diet and lack of exercise. Therefore they are nutritional injuries which are leading to deaths (WHO, 2010). This is a big factor, not only in Sierra Leone but the whole world is going through number of amounts of deaths due to the poor food health choices.

Victim after an amputation during the Civil War. Retrieved from https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2012/11/16/ghosts-of-civil-war-haunt-sierra-leone-polls

Health Promotions 

The government is pushing to get health problems in Sierra Leone under control. They created the “Country Cooperation Strategy” which outlined different things that they would do to help. The first plan was to newborn and child health. Second plan was to up the healthcare security. Third plan was to create prevention plans and goals to reduce the numbers of the death happening. Lastly, the government wanted to also support the growth of health systems by also giving them everything needed for them to prosper. This plan was created after the Ebola outbreak. Sierra Leone got help from third parties, like United Nations and  World Health Organization (WHO, 2017). 

According to the article "Health sector fragmentation: three examples from Sierra Leone",  there have been some things implemented to help Sierra Leone, such as “The CHW programme was officially introduced by UNICEF, USAID, JSI, and the World Bank (among others) with the MoHS in 2012 to strengthen primary health care delivery at the community level” (Barr, 2019). That organization was set to strengthen the primary healthcare delivery was not the only thing that was implemented into Sierra Leone. According to WHO, The infection prevention control was also implemented into, Sierra Leone, and the main goal of this was to “The ultimate goal of Infection Prevention and Control (IPC) is to strengthen and standardize the quality and safety of health services for patients, health care workers, and others actors in the health care setting and surrounding environment” (WHO). Through all the struggle that Sierra Leone, has been through the government has tried to fight for the people in implementing small but very helpful things to help conquer the health issues that are occurring in Sierra Leone. 

Sources

World Health Organization. (2017). Country Cooperation Strategy. Retrieved from https://www.afro.who.int/sites/default/files/2017-05/summary-of-who-country-coorperation-strategy_sierra-leone.pdf

World Health Organization. (2010). Sierra Leone's long recovery from the scars of war. Retrieved from https://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/88/10/10-031010/en/

Barr, Garrett, Marten, Kadandale. (2019). Health sector fragmentation: three examples from Sierra Leone. Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6341573/?report=classic

bottom of page