We leave tomorrow! Hannah, Daniel and I will be (finally) heading out to Malawi tomorrow as part of Rice University’s BTB Summer Internships. We are going to St. Gabriel’s Hospital in Namitete where we will spend two months introducing technologies that have been designed by students at Rice University as well as working on projects that past interns have started there.
It has started to calm down before we head out tomorrow on the long journey to Namitete, however the last two weeks we have been packing and preparing the technologies we will be taking with us.
Hannah and I were busy assembling the HSA Community Healthworker Backpacks and packing them into two giant suitcases while Daniel was building a device called Sphygmo which is a blood pressure monitor that takes measurements automatically at a set time interval. The HSA Backpacks are filled with some essential healthcare equipment that can be taken out into the field to diagnose and treat patients. A quick description of the backpacks is in the link below. Go ahead and check out Daniel’s blog for more about Sphygmo (malawi.blogs.rice.edu/author/dhh2)!
http://www.rice360.rice.edu/Resources/Documents/HSA%20and%20pregnancy%20pack%20final.pdf
While abroad we will also be working on DataPall. DataPall is a database that was developed by Beyond Traditional Borders interns at St. Gabriel’s hospital last summer. The database allows for recording and storing of patient data in the Palliative Care Unit. Our job is to both check up on and expand the database so that it can hopefully run on the laptops as well as the desktop computers at the hospital. We have been learning as much as we can about how DataPall was developed and how it works with a lot of help from Kamal, one of the interns who developed it last year. For the past week I have been studying up on how to use Microsoft Access and the ins and outs of how DataPall works.
After weeks of planning and preparation I can’t believe departure day is finally upon us! I am both nervous and excited to see what the next two months at St. Gabriel’s has in store for us!