11 June 2013 - The Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Guinea-Bissau, José Ramos-Horta, on Tuesday, 11 June 2013, visited the Raoul Follereau Hospital, a medical institution in Bissau run by an Italian not-for-profit organisation under an agreement with the Government of Guinea-Bissau.

The visit was part of a tour of medical institutions conducted in recent weeks by the Special Representative. Other institutions already visited by Mr. Ramos-Horta include the Bissau Military Hospital, the Simão Mendes Hospital, also in Bissau, and the Bafatá Hospital in the east of the country.

The Raoul Follereau Hospital is managed by Aid, Health and Development (AHEAD), an Italian NGO. Under an agreement with the Government, the state provides electricity, supplies TB medication and pays the salaries of the institution's staff, all of whom are Guinea-Bissauans, according to Ahead's Fabio Riccardi. The NGO, whose members are volunteers, takes care of the rest. Services are free and the institution grows most of the vegetables and fruits that its patients consume.

Mr. Ramos-Horta said he has been visiting the hospitals in order to be better informed and more aware of the health problems of the country. Recalling his visits to the other institution, he noted that the Military Hospital, built and equipped by the People's Republic of China, was well equipped but had a shortage of medical staff. The military hospital, over 90 percent of whose clients are civilians, has medical personnel from Guinea-Bissau, China and from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) Monitoring Group, ECOMIG, but still needs many more, according to its administrators.

On the other hand, the Simão Mendes Hospital, which is the main hospital in the country, is in a regrettable state, and needs to be completely overhauled and modernized, the Special Representative stated.

Despite the crises Guinea-Bissau has gone through, and the funding problems that have affected the country in recent months, "from time to time we find oases of success, of good work," Ramos-Horta said at the end of his visit to Raoul Follereau Hospital. "This hospital is one such oasis."

Health care is a major challenge in Guinea-Bissau as available data indicate.

There were seven nurses and one doctor for every 10,000 inhabitants in Guinea-Bissau in 2007, according to a country profile for Guinea-Bissau produced in 2010 by the Africa Health Workforce Observatory (AHWO), a network of countries and organisations promoted by the Africa regional Office of the World Health Organisation. The AHWO report noted that it was difficult to motivate medical staff to stay in the health services and quoted Guinea-Bissau's Directorate of Human Resources as estimating that 48% of health care staff would have left the sector by 2015.