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on Shona in Sierra Leone (Sierra Leone), 16/Oct/2010 18:11, 34 days ago
Hospital Goings OnSo…. Perhaps not surprisingly, I still don’t have my medical registration yet. Its getting a bit ridiculous really…In the meantime– I have finished doing my lectures - another on genetics and two respiratory, although the students also asked me to cover neonatal tetanus (cause I’m the world’s leading expert on that… not!), childhood obesity (in Sierra Leone! I am still pondering on why!), seizures (okay that’s important – a lot of children come in with “convulsions” or “shake shake” but I’m never sure if this is a seizure, a rigor, or what, as the history taking is… somewhat deficient….) and “birth asphyxia”. HIE is fairly common here and as a good proportion of my students want to be obstetricians one day I have tried to instil that “prevention is better than cure”. So thanks to James and Dr Anthony for sending out the slides! The students are away doing obs and gynae lectures for three weeks before coming back to us for clinical teaching.We had an M&M meeting on Thursday. A lot more mortality than morbidity…. Its only the third M&M they have had here so everyone’s still getting used to the fact that its not a place to fight about whose fault the death was – the doctor’s for not reviewing them enough or changing the antibiotics, the nurses’ for not giving the said medication or not doing observations, the mothers’ for not taking them in soon enough or for discharging against medical advice, the maintenance people for not sorting out any running water, the ministry of health’s for not providing any equipment or the government’s for not educating the population… the list goes on….Anyway, it was an interesting meeting– most children (apparently) die from severe malaria and severe anaemia. I say apparently because although we actually have access to blood films and rapid antigen tests, no one actually does them… So there is no way to really tell what they die from.I feel I’m being critical when there is a huge amount of good stuff happening. Some of the nurses are fantastic – they put in all the cannulas – and the triage is great. It was Global Handwashing Day (yes, without running water in the hospital….) on Friday so Becky and Gibril (one of the SL nurses from the observation ward) had organised an education day for the staff and parents. It was so much fun going around the wards. Some of the nurses from the Therapeutic Feeing Centre had made up a skit and then sang Krio songs to get the message across. It was a lot of fun and all the better that it was done mostly by the Sierra Leonean staff.I’ve been writing for a while… so… more later! I'll try to get up some photos at some point too, now that Matt the vodaphone photographer has fixed my camera!