First Day in the Hospital

Monday morning we piled into a van that took us for a fifteen minute drive through the village to get to Malindi District Hospital. Once there we met with the director of the hospital who would be our so called mentor throughout the process. He assigned each of us a different ward that we would be rotating through for a week each. I was assigned pediatrics which I was pretty happy about. The hospital had several different rooms, all connected by out door passageways. Patients lined these hallways in crowds and the heat was overwhelming. When I got to the peds ward, the health care standards were equally low. Babies shared beds for lack of room, there were flies everywhere and of course, there was no air conditioning. At one point a cat even entered and no one even blinked twice. The majority of children had been admitted for dehydration, malnutrition, pneumonia, and malaria. I saw one baby with HIV-mother to child transmission, and one child with kidney disease whose entire body was completely swollen. I proceeded to go on rounds with the doctors, learned a little bit about each disease and then I was sent to what was their triage center. There, I was able to give finger pricks to children and their mothers in order to test them for HIV and/or Malaria. In Malindi, 8 out of 10 patients test positive for HIV, an overwhelming statistic, however 0/10 of the patients I tested were positive. The clinical officer (Kenyan version of Nurse Practitioner) that was with us did not bother to wear gloves while testing and the table that the supplies were on was full of dirty gauze, used needles, and open malaria blood testing slides. This alone was huge. I was pretty nervous during the first test, just because I was dealing with such huge diseases, two out of the three largest WHO public health problems in the world, but using gloves and precaution, i knew i would be totally safe. I anticipate seeing very interesting cases while I am here which will definitely be beneficial in the states. The doctors told me that just a few days before a man was in surgery for getting bitten by a hippo, that certainly would not have happened at home. Although the first day was a little slow, I still learned a bit, and just being at the hospital was eye opening.