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Mercy Ships

One of the favourite subjects of complaint in the papers is the NHS. Successive Governments have tried a variety of ways to improve the Health Service, throwing ever larger sums of money at the problem, fixing targets for waiting periods, drawing up league tables, but still the demand rises, horror stories of waiting times and botched operations appear, and the dissatisfaction grows. Of course, levels of satisfaction in anything are always linked to expectations, and the more we read about what can be done, either to cure us or simply to improve our well-being, the more we expect that it must be done, and done quickly, and the more we are disappointed by delays. Hence the many complaints, which would not have been heard 60 years ago when the NHS was founded, partly because people then had much lower expectations.

They have lower expectations in Liberia , too. In fact, sick people there probably have no expectations, no hope, at all. Many suffer from disease and disfigurement caused by malnutrition and weak immune systems, with little chance of a cure in a country which, like many in Africa , has undergone years of political unrest. But for the past three years a medical charity, Mercy Ships , has brought a team of doctors and nurses to Liberia to carry out screening and operations.

This year, for the first time, the Liberian Government and the UN considered the security situation stable enough to allow a large public gathering to be held, so that a mass patient screening could be carried out in the capital, Monrovia . A team also travelled inland to screen potential patients. 117 patients will receive reconstructive surgery, a further 60 will have orthopaedic operations, and 17 women will be operated on for birth injuries.

The ship, the Africa Mercy , is manned by 400 volunteer crew providing free medical care, relief aid, and community development programmes to Liberia . They can carry out, on board, about 7000 operations a year, including cataract removal, tumour removal, cleft lip and palate reconstruction, orthopaedics, and obstetric fistula repair. These often very simple but life-changing operations are common practice in developed countries but, without the service provided by Mercy Ships, are rarely available to the poor of Africa .

So next time you're kept waiting in a corridor at the LGI, just think of Liberians and the Mercy Ships.