Sabha and I spent our first week outfitting CLI’s health clinic with donated medical supplies that have come over on recent container shipments. While the construction of the clinic was complete when we were given a brief tour Wednesday afternoon, the rooms were empty except for several storerooms piled high with boxes of donated materials. After sleeping in quite a bit Wednesday morning, Sabha and I got busy organizing and inventorying the boxes. The plan is to get the clinic prepared for inspection by the Ministry of Health in early July. Mr. Rogers informed us that the Ministry generally pays for most consumables, vaccinations, and nurses, who are hired by, trained by, and report to the organization and then reimbursed by the government. This enables CLI and other NGOs to maintain their own standards and the nurses feel that they are employed by the organization and not the government. Unfortunately, the Ministry went broke last year and although they have approved a budget, CLI has had to work for donations and may not be provided with the supplies promised. Completing this inventory will be extremely important in determining what medicines, consumables, and devices are still necessary to obtain.
As of now (Friday evening) we have almost completely finished going through the boxes in the two storerooms and will continue tomorrow (here the workweek includes Saturday morning) by going through the boxes in the maternity ward storeroom. After emptying out the rooms and separating the boxes, we proceeded to reorganize the storerooms with excess items or items that we felt would not be needed in the respective examination, treatment, and laboratory rooms. We set up several metals shelves for one of the storerooms and have spoken with Jeff about getting built-in shelving in the other and shelves above the sinks in each of the treatment and examination rooms.
On Thursday we got the opportunity to speak with some of the women working at the project and practice our Chichewa (which is coming along slowly). They had been cleaning the hospital beds and brought them up to the clinic to be placed in the rooms. The women had spent nearly the entire day scrubbing and moving the extremely heavy beds. Unfortunately we will have to wait to put them in all of the rooms because we didn’t realize at first that they were too wide for the doorways and we’ll have to get some help from the men to rotate and carry them in sideways. Next week, we hope to start stocking the individual rooms with consumables that will need to be readily accessible. Hopefully the shelving will be ready so that we can finish organizing and finally be rid of all of the boxes that have occupied the hallway of the clinic since we started working! We have also talked with Mr. Rogers about meeting with a local RN who may be able to help us hone in on exactly what we are missing and things that may be better suited for the larger regional hospitals.
The well repair men are currently out of the area, but they should be back within a week or so and Mr. Rogers has told us that we should be able to join them on several of the repairs. Once we get the opportunity to speak with a nurse or physician we will also be able to ask whether or not it might be possible to incorporate a health aspect to the repair missions. More specifically we can ask whether or not our health packs would be useful on such missions.
THE CLINIC:
Here’s a basic description of the clinic itself. The clinic has two wards – a maternity ward and a general outpatient ward. They are connected by a small courtyard area that will serve as the waiting area when it is operational. The general outpatient ward has two storerooms, a secretarial room, 3 treatment rooms, an examination room, a holding room, a laboratory, a pharmacy, a staff toilet, and a sluice room. The maternity ward as a large prenatal room (with 5 beds), 2 postnatal rooms (with one bed each), a delivery room (with 2 beds), a sluice room, several toilets (3), a storeroom, and a nurse’s station.
