NHS volunteer Dr Daniel Cooper writes for ITV News from Sierra Leone about what it's like to work on the frontline fighting Ebola.
The last six weeks have been simultaneously the hardest and most professionally and personally rewarding of my life.
I am part of the second wave of NHS volunteers deployed to Sierra Leone as part of the UK government response to the Ebola epidemic and growing humanitarian crisis in West Africa.
As a renal and general medical doctor back home, I’m used to being able to offer our patients the best life saving drugs and cutting edge treatments, so adapting to work in a resource-limited setting for the first time was a real challenge. The situation in Sierra Leone is dire. The fragile economy present before the epidemic has been destroyed - made worse by falling literacy levels and failing infrastructure as schools and hospitals close.
In the midst of this, our group of 20 doctors, nurses and paramedics were deployed to a town in north central Sierra Leone called Makeni, to set up, open and operate a 100-bed Ebola Treatment Centre funded by the Department for International Development and run by the NGO.