Summary of Sector Response Model - A Quality Management System that Led to Liberia’s Success in Fighting Ebola

The story of how Liberia’s most populous county, Montserrado, turned around an exponentially-growing Ebola outbreak is intriguing. WHO’s team and national officials, aided by veterans from WHO’s polio eradication group in India, decentralized the response, using quality management principles that empowered local teams and held them accountable for results. These local sector teams involved more than 4,000 community members, using business best practices and an incident management system to vastly improve surveillance, case finding, contact tracing, and overall management of key response activities.

Liberia, where the Ebola outbreak seeing exponential growth in cases last September and treatment centers filled up the day they opened, started to turn back the epidemic when it organized and empowered local teams to handle the response.