Sunday, July 4, 2010
Happy Independence Day everyone!!!! I realized this is the third Independence Day I have spent out of the good ol’ USA that I can remember, last year was England, the year before that was in Mexico for another Beyond Traditional Borders thing and the year before that, well I had just finished high school and I hardly remember. Maybe Yiwen and I will try and bake something, or else we could stage a mock battle between us and our English medical school housemates which culminates in our victory and their signing of a Bill of Rights.
It has been an exciting first few days at Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital. We arrived into Blantyre from Lilongwe on Thursday with Dr. Oden and Dr. Machen. Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital is a large hospital in Blantyre, that has one of the largest catchment areas in Malawi according to population. It is much larger and busier than St. Gabriels, with more doctors. When we arrived we met Dr. Sarah Rylance, from Liverpool, who is in charge of the neonatal ward. She will be the person doing most of our mentoring I think. She took all of us on a tour of the neonatal intensive unit (NICU) the low risk room and the kangaroo room, all three of which form the neonatal ward. Usually when a child is born, it is taken to the NICU then observed. If it is stable and of a good size it is moved to low risk and then finally to the kangaroo room. Once a child is in kangaroo with its mother it is monitored for weight gain. If the child is above a certain weight, it must gain consistently for three days before it is discharged. If the child is under this weight the child must gain to it before discharge. All are expected to come back in a week for another check up. Yiwen and my eyes both lit up when we saw the NICU because it is so full of goodies to work with.
After our tour, we met with Dr. Molyneux, who Dr. Oden and Dr. Richards-Kortum have been working with for a while for feedback and ideas on design projects. She has also published some studies about pediatric cancer and other things related to the pediatric ward at Queen Elizabeth, so she also is a valuable researcher as well. After Dr. Oden and Dr. Machen demoed the CPAP, a fluorescent field microscope and the Sally centrifuge, Dr. Molyneux suggested that they demo for all the doctors at Friday’s morning mortality meeting.
After all the interest in the Sally centrifuge and the CPAP, they are going to be staying with here to do some preliminary testing. They have a more traditional CPAP in the NICU but it doesn’t seem to be working. Its good to give these devices a field test run before and more formal data collection goes on, since it will give us an opportunity to make any unforeseen changes that need to be done so that the device fits the environment.