LSTM’s Well Travelled Clinics coordinated the health screening for 239 NHS staff who were seconded via an organisation called UKMED, to help in the response to the Ebola virus disease outbreak in Sierra Leone. The team in Liverpool saw 124 of these personnel themselves with the remaining 115 being sent to clinics in London and Scotland. A total of 159 NHS volunteers have been screened by WTC on return from Sierra Leone.
As part of this work, for the very first NHS team that was deployed to Sierra Leone a team of four from WTC set up a temporary clinic at the Army medical services training corp. in Strensall, York, with one of the army tents becoming a makeshift clinic. Four members of LSTM’s Well Travelled Clinics (WTC) spent four very long days preparing the group of 34 humanitarian aid workers who were taking part in a nine-day pre-deployment training programme at the Army Medical Training Centre in York before travelling to Sierra Leone to help fight the Ebola virus.
Philippa Tubb, WTC’s Managing Director, along with a nurse and two doctors from the clinic, travelled to the Centre to set up and run this special off site clinic managing the initial UKMED volunteers. Working long days the team carried out medicals, psychological reviews, vaccinations and gave out anti malarials, so that the aid workers would be ready for deployment as soon as the programme was finished. Due to the extremely difficult conditions that these and all subsequent volunteers were working in the team worked hard to ensure they were as prepared as possible for the task ahead of them.
Throughout the several months that followed all of the staff at WTC became involved with assessment of subsequent volunteers prior and post their deployment to West Africa.