Dad's Blog

The following is Dad's summary of some of the things he has been involved with during the past 2 weeks. He is keeping busy and really enjoying his work. We all enjoy hearing about it...

My last week in Casualty was spent working on operational improvements in the mornings when Casualty was slow and seeing patients and supervising the Clinical Officers in the afternoon. We started a new process for registering and triaging patients that proved to be very successful.

Covered hospital pathways.

I ended up being on call for Medicine for Fri, Sat and Sun. I offered to do the Fri for the other Medicine Consultant so he could raft the Nile in Uganda with a few other visitors. When I agreed to this, however, I didn’t realize that the Fri was a stat holiday here (Labor Day). So it was a busy 3 days rounding on 40 pts a day – the first 2 days took 7 hours a day. Unfortunately I had 2 ICU patients die on the Sun morning – both were post natal moms in their 20’s who presented in late septic shock – very sad.

Female Medical Ward.

The first week on the Medicine ward wasn’t as bad as I had imagined it would be – perhaps it was because I started with having rounded on all the patients for the previous 3 days. Now I am just rounding on half the pts and had 2 interns to do most of the work. After the interns round on the pts by themselves, I go around with them to review their pts – this is a combination of supervising and teaching rounds and is a lot of fun. The interns are very bright and keen. It is a mutual learning experience.

View of some of the Tenwek Hospital buildings.

On Wed morning I did the devotional for the interns and consultants which went very well. At lunch the same day I did an educational presentation to the interns on Acute and Chronic Liver Disease. On Thurs we had all the medicine interns (4) and the consultant over for lunch followed by some ping pong J. On Medicine, there aren’t too many responsibilities in the afternoon so I’m able to continue working on some operations improvements. This weekend was a nice break after working 2 weeks straight. More about our weekend activities will be provided by other family members. This Tues I’ll be presenting of few ideas and suggestions to the long term doctors at their bimonthly meeting for their feedback and suggestions re implementation. I’ll also be meeting with the head of lab, radiology and nursing. I hope to have an implementation mandate and plan in place by the end of the week. I have Fri off this week as it’s our turn to go on a Safari – we are very excited about this! Enjoying the adventure, Dad