District Hospitals:
This last week we were on the road with Sam and MK (from Blantyre) to many district hospitals for the ongoing CPAP project. We scavenged for baseline data to be used on the upcoming study. Getting a chance to leave Namitete and hop around the country was a great refreshing experience. MK has been really great taking out us out to eat at some awesome restaurants in the big cities. It’s kind of nice not having to defeather, gut, and clean chickens for dinner!
Visiting the district hospitals really made me appreciate St. Gabriel’s Hospital. These hospitals seem to be really struggling to keep up with the number of patients they have. Nurses and doctors seem a little overwhelmed and patients fill all the hallways and wards. I realize that there is a serious need for better records keeping in all the hospitals in this country. Currently the health workers use register notebooks that are never consistent and the patient charts are often torn pieces of paper bandaged together. Handwriting is atrocious and accurate summarization of patient information is almost impossible to find. This presents difficulties for the hospitals when they need to report accurate numbers to receive the correct number of supplies and funding from the government and outside organizations.
The problem is multifaceted:
1) Healthcare workers don’t have the time to write detailed notes, too many patients
2) Hospitals don’t have uniformity in their various paper forms
3) Digital records keeping is light years away
4) Staff rotate between wards and specialities
5) More reasons that I am most likely unaware of because I don’t actually work in each of the hospitals every day
Fantasy Suites:
Near the end of our week traveling we stayed at a hotel in a small town called Bilaka. We got to stay in Fantasy Suites!
“Do you think they’ve ever washed these sheets?” – Daniel Hwang