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Exploring the Journey of the National Ebola Survivors’ Program

Executive Summary

Baylor Foundation Uganda is delighted to have been selected to participate in the response against the Sudan Ebola virus disease (SUDV) that broke out on September 20, 2022. Together with assistance from development partners and in collaboration with other implementing partners, we stepped up efforts to prevent, detect, and respond to the public health emergency that began in the Mubende and Kassanda districts and eventually spread to the districts of Bunyangabu, Jinja, Kagadi, Kampala, Kyegegwa, and Masaka, as well as the four high-risk non-response districts of Kakumiro, Kyenjojo, Kabarole, and Mityana. During our four-month involvement, we implemented various strategies, such as SUDV situation rooms/Data Center, to provide timely situation updates. We further seconded staff to the Ministry of Health (MOH) Incident Management Team and the National Public Health Emergency Operations Centers to support epidemiology, surveillance, public health emergencies, health informatics, and the development of alert management systems (AMS) to guide tailored response efforts at both district and national levels.

Additionally, we improved surveillance response efforts to support contact tracing, active case search for sick persons and suspected SUDV alerts, point of entry (PoE) screening at border points, community-based disease surveillance, and mortality surveillance. We further assisted 489 healthcare facilities to implement SUDV IPC/WASH (Infection Prevention and control / Water, Sanitation and Hygiene) and further trained 138 laboratory personnel and 154 drivers across five districts on safe SUDV specimen collection and transportation from contacts, confirmed cases, and dead bodies.

Our collaborative efforts enabled Uganda to contain the virus within a record four months. Even after this remarkable accomplishment, it was necessary to follow up the Ebola survivors. With support from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the Ministry of Health in partnership with Baylor Foundation Uganda, established the National Ebola Survivors’ Program, the first of its kind in Uganda. This program has been instrumental in providing mental health, psychosocial support, and clinical care to Ebola survivors to support their full recovery from the after-effects of the Ebola virus disease and address stigmatization and discrimination in their communities.

This initiative has so far managed to prevent a resurgence of the disease that resides in the immunological sites of men and nursing mothers. We express our gratitude to USAID for facilitating the tracking of the Ebola virus’ persistence in these survivors, with 95% of them turning negative by December 2023. The program is currently being funded by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Introduction

The Ministry of Health (MOH) Uganda established the National Ebola Survivors Program with assistance from Baylor Foundation Uganda and with funding from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) on November 1, 2022. The aim of the program was to provide high-quality medical care, mental health, and psychosocial support services to Ebola survivors at established survivor clinics. The clinics also provided nutritional support to infants below 2 years of age who are children of Ebola survivors.

These clinics are located at Mubende Regional Referral Hospital, Entebbe Regional Referral Hospital and Kikandwa HC III and are being run in collaboration with other health implementing partners to facilitate the survivors’ full recovery.

The National Ebola Survivors’ Program currently provides general and specialized medical care to Ebola survivors to address short and long-term health problems to address various effects of the Sudan Ebola virus (SUDV). These survivors include men, women, lactating mothers and children who have been affected by the virus. The program is also addressing the risk of the Ebola virus disease (EVD) resurgence by providing sexual-risk reduction counseling and access to viral persistence testing for semen and breast milk among men and breastfeeding mothers, respectively.

Additionally, the program is providing psychosocial support to EVD survivors and their families to enable them cope with post-EVD trauma, as well as community stigma and discrimination. To help them fully recover, the program has trained community resource persons and survivors to provide continuous counseling support to EVD survivors.