This morning, I arrived sharply at 8 am for peds morning handover meeting. They went through deaths and cases from the last 24 hours and at the end someone said “Oh… and by the way, pharmacy is on strike.” I thought I had heard wrong, but nope, apparently pharmacy was actually on strike. I couldn’t really understand the whole story, but I think it had something to do with 2 people were supposed to take an exam but refused to. So the government suspended their license or stopped letting them work and then the rest of pharmacy decided to stop working too. I asked one of the doctors and he said that they had problems getting some drugs yesterday, but thankfully they had most of the drugs they needed in the wards themselves. I was shocked that the pharmacy at the largest hospital in Malawi could go on strike. Thankfully, when I visited later in the afternoon it looked like it was fully functional.
Also, this morning, when I went to Chatinkha nursery there was a baby with birth asphyxia with very high respiratory rate and chest indrawings. Florence started putting the baby on the new pumani bCPAP machine; however, we soon realized that there were not enough oxygen concentrators to hook it up. I knew that there was an extra one sitting in the peds office so I ran to the admin office and brought it to Chatinkha nursery. Thankfully there was an extra oxygen concentrator at Queens; however, I know there are many other situations where that is not the case and the doctors and nurses just have to make do. Normally, an oxygen concentrator is split 5 ways and then can be split even more further down the line before it even reaches the patient. So the amount of oxygen that each patient really gets is not very much at all.
There was also a baby that weighed 660 grams that was born today. One of the nurses from the UK said that the baby would have a chance of surviving if it was in the UK, but it was nearly impossible here. Its really disappointing to know that there are other places in the world that could offer these patients more. This is what doctors and nurses have to face here daily.
To end on a more uplifting note, here is a photo of a baby giraffe that I saw a few weeks ago.
