Muli bwanji! Greetings from Malawi!
It’s hard to believe that we have already been in Malawi for almost three weeks. I am so grateful to be here at St. Gabriel’s in Namitete. The staff at St. Gabriel’s as well as the other volunteers welcomed us very warmly and we quickly acclimated to our new environment.
We brought six technologies to St. Gabriel’s that we presented to the medical staff shortly after our arrival. As the internship progresses, I will use this blog to discuss the feedback that we receive on several of these technologies as the summer progresses. (Teresa’s blog has a great description of these technologies.)
Over the past two weeks, we have been working diligently on our first special project—creating an electronic medical records system specially catered to St. Gabriel’s palliative care programs. This assignment has been especially interesting to me as I spent the year working on the morphine dosing project, inspired by last year’s interns’ observations at St. Gabriel’s.
Palliative care aims to improve “the quality of life of patients and their families facing the problem associated with life-threatening illness, through the prevention and relief of suffering by means of early identification and impeccable assessment and treatment of pain and other problems, physical, psychosocial and spiritual” (WHO). St. Gabriel’s demonstrates an obvious commitment to palliative care: the Family Centered Care Unit (FCCU) facility is devoted entirely to St. Gabriel’s palliative care programs. Currently, patients receive support from the FCCU through inpatient stays, outpatient visits, and through an active network of several hundred community volunteers who help to facilitate home-based care.
Our assignment, in short, is to design a program through which St. Gabriel’s FCCU staff can evaluate how their services are used and browse patient records as necessary. Over the past two weeks, I have spent many hours inputting hundreds (perhaps thousands) of patient records. In looking through pages and pages of records, I am impressed by the diversity of patients (and families) who use these services. Patients range in age from two to 90 with varied diagnoses. By far, the two most common diagnoses that I encountered in the records were cervical cancer and HIV/AIDS-related conditions (especially Kaposi’s Sarcoma).
The large number of palliative care patients at St. Gabriel’s attests to the value of this type of care. By extending comfort and support (in different forms) to terminally ill patients and their loved ones, the dedicated staff at the FCCU provides a service that is highly valued in many communities in and around Namitete.
We will continue to learn about palliative care in Malawi in the coming weeks as we work to complete this project. Additionally, a visiting doctor from Salima, Malawi came to our technology presentation at St. Gabriel’s and graciously invited us to demonstrate our technologies at his hospital, Ndi Moyo. Ndi Moyo is a hospital dedicated exclusively to providing palliative care services in that community. We look forward to our visit to Salima on June 26!