“Give others the space to talk.”

As someone with a tendency to talk, to get excited about the smallest of things, keeping this phrase in mind as I spent my five days walking through the halls of Kamuzu Central Hospital (KCH) played an important role in my data-gathering. A lot of what I did was listen and watch. I talked only to ask questions or to introduce myself to the nurses and patients I came across.

Those first few days I was nervous. Would we able to get enough information? Would the nurses and physicians take the time to speak with us – strangers and students? These questions rattled around inside my mind as we set foot onto KCH’s sprawling campus.

On that first day, the tour we were given at the hospital left me feeling more lost than when I first arrived. Before I asked any questions about hypothermia, before I started working on the concentrators, I got lost. I wandered through the hospital with a single purpose: to understand where I was and the people I was working with. It took some time, but eventually, I knew which wards I wanted to visit – the labor ward, the nursery, the kangaroo mother care ward, and the large number of wards with oxygen concentrators ranging from pediatric to surgical wards.

I spent some of my days taking apart oxygen concentrators, documenting their faults, and speaking with the hospital’s Physical Assets Management (PAM) engineers. The rest of the time I spent in the wards. Where I could, I took the time to watch and observe, paying attention to the way the nurses worked, the way patients behaved, and the way the wards were set up.

Along with the observations, I talked with nurses and physicians learning about hypothermia and the concentrators little by little. Each story shed some more light on the challenges we might tackle as students and biomedical engineers.

Over these last 5 days, the physicians, nurses, and engineers I worked with taught me a little bit more about what it means to be an engineer and helped me understand a little better what role I might play in the future as a physician and engineer. Thank you, Kamuzu Central Hospital, for welcoming us with openly and warmly!