Madzuka bwanji (good morning, how are you) from Namitondo!

Our first week, thus far, has been about observing; we’re mostly focusing on palliative care right now because much of Rice’s collaboration (DataPall and the CHW Backpacks) with St. Gabriel’s has been with the HBPC (Home Based Palliative Care) team.

The majority of the hospital’s palliative care work is done with outpatients and in the community. There are 16 (6 M, 6 F, 4 Peds) beds in the inpatient ward, but St. Gabriel’s is the hospital for approximately 250,000 people in this area. After we talked to Sister Justa and Nurse Comfort (Kamal, Teresa, and Tara: they say mulibwanji!), who work most directly with DataPall, we helped Comfort sort pills during the outpatient clinic. While we were there, we met many of the patients who were getting treatment.

Most of the patients’ primary health issue is cancer, cardiovascular disease, or HIV, but sometimes the ward sees sickle cell patients. The patients come in once a month to pick up medicines and get a checkup; if necessary they are admitted to the inpatient ward. Morphine is a very important resource here. For many patients, Comfort measured 1mg/mL “weak” liquid morphine into a plastic jug which they took home for the month. Everyone was very interested to talk with us, and we’re hoping that they find our limited Chichewa endearing.

 

”]We’ve only begun looking at the problems that Justa and Comfort had been having with DataPall, but from our conversations with them DataPall has been especially useful for two things: tracking individual patient data and generating reports for internal use, for government use, and for NGOs from whom St. Gabriel’s gets funding. The reporting needs to be fixed a bit, which is one of the places where we’re starting work.

The database is built to track patient profiles, appointment information, and prescribed drugs. They use the patient tracking element, however, in a very neat way that I hadn’t anticipated: every month, they check back over their patients and see who has missed appointments, and if they see a pattern or concern they ask a community health worker to stop by the patient’s home and find out what’s happening.

The plan for the rest of the week is to keep working on DataPall and bring the newly-arrived CHW Backpacks to Alex. We’re also looking forward to market day in Namitondo today. Comments, questions, updates and emails of any kind are most welcome at ha9@rice.edu