Sierra Leone: Chinese Hospital in Jui set to become a training ground for COMAHS Students – Minister of Health

According to the Minister of Health and Sanitation, Dr. Abubakarr Fofanah, The ChinaSierra Leone Friendship Hospital, located at Jui, will become the official teaching hospital of College of Medicine and Allied Health Sierra Leone (COMAHS).

Dr. Abubakarr Fofanah, “Since the establishment of the College of Medicine and Allied Health Science, Sierra Leone has had no formal teaching hospitals for medical students.”

Teaching hospitals are hospitals with a formal affiliation to a medical school like COMAHS, and they provide specialized medical care to patients, as well as clinical education and training for doctors, nurses and other health professionals.

Since 1988, medical students from COMAHS have not served or learned through a formalized teaching hospital. Till now, Connaught Hospital and others served as practice hospitals, but they were not teaching hospitals in the true sense of the word.
The Health Minister furthered that the administrative set up in a teaching hospital is far different from that of a general hospital. Teaching hospitals offer and encourage the practice of evidence-based medicine, specialised surgeries, modern drugs and other intensive treatments that a general or regional hospital cannot provide.

Dr. Fofanah added, “Teaching hospitals usually provide the best standard of patient care. A teaching hospital, affiliated with a medical school, is used to train doctors, and often is involved in research.”
Military hospitals, he continued, have strong commitments to the promotion of teaching and learning, citing that student training in teaching hospitals is more closely supervised by experienced doctors and student discipline is more religiously enforced.
Concluding, Dr. Fofanah assured donors and the public that in the next three years, the first set of “Made-in-Salone” surgeon specialists will be ready to serve the people of Sierra Leone.