This is the end of our first week at Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital. A typical day begins with a meeting at 8 o’clock for all the pediatric doctors and medical students, and lasts about an hour. Medical students present mortality data in the different wards for the previous week and present interesting cases. You may remember that I mentioned the rabies case. It seems like these meetings serve the dual purpose of updating people like Dr. Molyneux about the goings on of each ward and helping the medical students refine their diagnostic skills and presentation style. For instance, there was one case presented the other day, with a long complicated history, that the medical student thought was related to HIV. But as it turned out in the end, the results from the child’s PCR (a definitive HIV diagnosis) had not yet been received and that if you looked at the symptoms without assuming HIV infection, it looked much more like cerebral palsy.

The first thing we tried to accomplish was to test the oxygen sensing device left here by Dr. Oden and Dr. Richards-Kortum last year when they visited Dr. Molyneux. Our plan was to then test the oxygen concentration output of all the oxygen concentrators in the neonatal ward. Unfortunately, after changing the oxygen sensor, changing the battery and fiddling around with the connections and calibration inside, we got it to work only intermittently and after a walking trip to and from the house back to the hospital, it refused to turn on again. Needless to say, Yiwen and I were disheartened by this set back, but we think we will still use it to atleast determine the flow rate of concentrated air from the concentrators to the individual children. We want to check this for two reasons:

1) the air output of one concentrator is split four ways here to supply as many children as possible

2) the CPAP device, (see next blog post) requires that you set the flow from the oxygen concentrator, so we want to know what sort of supply we can get.