Grison Pressure Transcript

Grison Pressure Transcript

We had been running the system up to now, and it's really working well, and now we have also--so after the Ebola crisis was declared over, the country now started moving to a more or less normal health delivery system. Some of the facilities which were closed, they began opening up. It also meant that Riders had more work to do carrying samples from those areas which were once closed and now they're opening up. And also the ETUs and the triple Cs were decommissioned once there was no more Ebola. When one is put in an ETU, there's that sense of fear that Ebola still exists, so they needed to decommission those ETUs and now the other health facilities were opening up.

Now, one challenge that faced Riders for Health is that since it was the only organization transporting specimens, the initial plan was that Riders would pick up specimens from a specific number of facilities, which was 302, in our case. But with the opening up of the other facilities, there was an overwhelming number that would balloon up to about five hundred and so, over five hundred facilities Riders had been picking up samples from. That had a lot of pressure on the resources in terms of the fuel, in terms of the motorcycle maintenance, and also in terms of the courier time that he spends on the motorcycle, that relative fatigue that is associated with riding a motorcycle for a long period of time. Of course, fatigue, you end up having more accidents, and that means that we also had more breakdowns. Of course, our budget was really not matching up, all the time, with this sudden change of operations. This is how it became a challenge. What was necessary was now to go back and discuss with the health facilities, discuss with CDC, discuss with the health facilities, tell them Riders is only picking from these 302 facilities. The Ministry needs to find other means to transport samples to bring them to Riders for Health pickup points, and then Riders for Health will pick them from there and then take them to the laboratory. This has been the discussion of, I think, six months, and now we're getting there. The ministries and other partners, actually, are beginning to--they've actually accepted that Riders cannot pick samples from each and every other corner of the country, but stick to the 302 facilities, given the amount of resources that are planned under the current project. So it's really now working, we will continue to push to make sure that everybody keeps on understanding the fact.