11 June 2012
Right now, I’m sitting in my room in Zitha House, the temporary home of guests and volunteers at St. Gabriel’s Hospital in Namitete. Kamal Shah, Tara Slough, and I have been placed here at St. Gabriel’s Hospital by Rice University’s Beyond Traditional Borders international internship program for the summer.
Overview of our first two weeks here:
1) Settling in and overcoming jet lag (so glad that Kamal, Tara, and I were able to meet up in Washington DC to fly over together through Addis Ababa to Lilongwe! It’s so nice to travel with friends.)
2) Reinforcing and distributing a new set of file folders for each of the patient wards
3) Meeting the clinicians, nurses, and staff in each of the wards (especially in the Family-Centered Care Unit for Palliative Care and in Pediatrics)
3) Presentation of the technologies we brought, including:
– Dremofuge: low-cost, battery-powered centrifuge for urine/stool
– SAPHE Pads: visual estimation of blood loss for post-partum hemorrhage emergency
– Bililight phototherapy system: for neonatal jaundice
– IV DRIP: mechanical IV clamp system to prevent overhydration
– Invertabottle and Liquidose: dosing systems for morphine
– Length board: portable length board for measuring infants on community visits
4) Project: to put together an electronic medical record system for the Palliative Care unit
– Using Microsoft Access, we are putting together a simple interface for inputting patient records (demographics, appointments, drug dosages) and outputting easy-to-use data for monthly, semi-annual, and annual reports.
5) Exploring Namitondo, Namitete, and Lilongwe in our free time and learning Chichewa
We received lots of good feedback for each of the technologies, and I’m looking forward to seeing how they can be implemented here in Malawi. I think that the most important technologies we could bring here are things that free up hospital staff to do the work they are trained to do, to lessen the administrative load and to create systems that reduce time spent manually doing small tasks.
Kamal, Tara, and I go to Morning Report at 7:30am each day. Morning Report is the time when almost all the medical staff at the hospital gather to hear updates from each of the wards — new admissions, deaths, patients who are especially sick. It’s become more and more easy for us to understand what’s going on during morning report; a good sign that we’re more acclimated to St. Gabriel’s!
Despite many limitations (due to infrastructure, staffing, and financial constraints), St. Gabriel’s does amazing work serving the people of Malawi (and Mozambique and Zambia, since it’s pretty close to the border). Their official mission statement is “to provide excellent services to the poor rural community and to all those in need, in a transparent and accountable manner.” And they really do fulfill this mission. It’s an honor to be here, to learn about the way things are done in developing world hospitals with limited resources and to help where we can.
I’ll close this first blog post with a picture I took of the sunset last weekend on the walk back to the hospital from Namitete.
