At the Corporate Communications Meeting held on February 2 in Sant Boi de Llobregat (Barcelona), attended by 30 communications officers from the centers of the Hospitaller Order of Saint John of God (OHSJD) in the Province of Aragon, Adriana Castro, Communications Officer at JCONGD, presented the management of the 2014 Ebola Communications Crisis.
The event was led by LluĂs Guilera, Communications Manager for the AragĂłn Province OHSJD, who was also involved in the response given by the Order of the Hospitallers to the massive request for information from local, national, and international media in August 2014, when it became known that there was a Spaniard in Liberia who could be infected with Ebola, the Brother of St. John of God Miguel Pajares.
Journalist JosĂ© Naranjo, a correspondent in Dakar, was the first to publish the news on Saturday, August 3, 2014, in El PaĂs, after contacting Juan Ciudad ONGD in Madrid and meeting with Adriana Castro via Skype to confirm the information and request an interview with Brother Pajares.
From then on, the news reached the media, which closely followed the progress of Brother Pajares's health, as well as that of the rest of the members of the community at St. Joseph's Hospital in Monrovia, which had to be temporarily closed and lost a total of eight people, including Brothers and collaborators, to Ebola.
The Ebola epidemic that severely affected several West African countries during 2014 and 2015 has so far caused more than 28,637 infections and 11,300 deaths. The Hospitaller Order entrusted Juan Ciudad NGO, as an organization specializing in international cooperation, with the coordination of humanitarian aid sent to its hospitals in Liberia and Sierra Leone, as well as with the repatriation of Brother Miguel Pajares (the first Ebola case to arrive in Europe and the second to leave Africa), and Brother Manuel GarcĂa Viejo, a doctor at the St. John of God Hospital in Sierra Leone.
The social alarm caused by the Ebola epidemic due to its magnitude led the World Health Organization to declare an international emergency on August 8, 2014. This was one day after Brother Miguel Pajares arrived in Spain to be treated at the Carlos III Hospital in Madrid, where he died a week later.
As Adriana Castro, responsible for managing the communications crisis at Juan Ciudad ONGD, explained, "These were very difficult and painful moments for the entire team, including Brothers and collaborators, as a total of 18 members of the Order died in Liberia and Sierra Leone, and we had to respond to two crises at the same time: the health emergency in Africa and the media pressure in Spain."
In addition to LluĂs Guilera from Barcelona, the two people responsible for communications for the Province of Castilla (OHSJD), Noelia SĂĄnchez in Madrid, and the Province of BĂ©tica, Concha GarcĂa in Seville, also supported the media response during the communications crisis.
The two St. John of God hospitals in Liberia and Sierra Leone reopened during the epidemic after much effort to comply with health safety protocols in an Ebola scenario. In total, in 2015, they treated nearly 25,000 people, many of them pregnant women and children, in the maternal and child care areas.
At Juan Ciudad NGO, we continue working to ensure that all the services they provided to the population before the arrival of Ebola can be reopened. These services are still not fully operational, and the need for them is great given the severe damage to existing infrastructure.
