Africana Studies Department, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA, USA.
Westminster Development Policy Network, University of Westminster, London, UK.
Glob Health Action. 2024 Dec 31;17(1):2411742. doi: 10.1080/16549716.2024.2411742. Epub 2024 Oct 11.
The doctoral dissertation examines how local response efforts were integrated into overall emergency management.
It seeks to understand the role and effectiveness of community-based actors in addressing collective action problems.
Sixty-seven semi-structured interviews were conducted from January to July 2017 in Liberia and Sierra Leone. Key informants include healthcare workers, traditional leaders, and community stakeholders, such as non-governmental organization representatives and volunteers.
Findings show that traditional and community leaders responded to the public health emergency via rulemaking, quarantine, travel limitation, healthcare referrals, health sensitization, and door-to-door contact tracing. These actions by local leaders helped to change behaviors and improve cooperation. Sierra Leone had 32.3% more Ebola cases than Liberia but 18% fewer deaths. Sierra Leone had integrated traditional and community leaders before the scale up of international aid resources.
This suggests that actions taken by traditional and community leaders improved overall efforts, and in some areas, before scaled-up humanitarian interventions. Bilateral engagement with local community actors should be integrated in every public health response to improve cooperation, and it should be done before an intervention is conceived and executed.
该博士论文研究了地方应对措施如何融入整体应急管理。
旨在了解社区行为体在解决集体行动问题方面的作用和有效性。
2017 年 1 月至 7 月期间，在利比里亚和塞拉利昂进行了 67 次半结构化访谈。主要受访者包括医疗工作者、传统领袖以及社区利益攸关方，如非政府组织代表和志愿者。
研究结果表明，传统和社区领袖通过制定规则、隔离、旅行限制、医疗转介、健康宣传和挨家挨户追踪接触等方式应对突发公共卫生事件。这些地方领导人的行动有助于改变行为并促进合作。塞拉利昂的埃博拉病例比利比里亚多 32.3%，但死亡人数却少 18%。塞拉利昂在国际援助资源大规模增加之前就已经整合了传统和社区领袖。
这表明传统和社区领袖的行动改善了整体应对效果，并且在某些方面，在大规模人道主义干预之前就已经有所改善。在构想和执行干预措施之前，应该将与当地社区行为体的双边接触纳入每一次公共卫生应对措施中，以提高合作。
