Medical Care

So things move slowly in Ghana.  I still do not know if I'll be working in a school or doing something with the local mental health project; the language barrier might be an issue with the latter.  Appropriate introductions are taking some time and no one seems to be in a hurry with respect to much of anything.  When we first arrived, Steve and I met with the medical director at the college (who Steve is, in part, working for) and he basically said it was nice to make our acquaintance and why don't we plan to meet in a month or so to discuss next steps…okay then.

Anyway, while Steve is starting to work on the emergency curriculum, he has been filling in time by working at the hospital.  And, the cool part is that I have been able to accompany him on rounds.  It’s incredibly interesting.  The facility is extraordinarily basic and bare bones with very limited resources.  The emergency room or casualty ward as they call it is about three years old.  It’s essentially another ward where the sicker patients are channeled, as opposed to going through outpatient as they had before.  But there isn’t really much that happens insofar as emergency-care as we know it.  On a positive note, many of the kids are there with malaria and that’s generally treatable if they get the hospital; so they get better.  The hospital has two doctors (in total) and they perform general surgeries; they do c-sections, appendectomys, etc. and the PAs do these as well.  I don’t quite have a handle on how well the hospital is staffed and/or how timely they are in getting a doctor or PA in for an emergency surgery; after a certain hour there are only nurses working and there is one in the ER.  Also, for a whole lot of other stuff, you’re pretty much screwed.  The lab is closed in the evening and Sundays (not sure about Sat) and is limited in the types of tests they can run.  They don’t intubate patients in the ER, do spinal taps, get an EKG; they have no ct scan at the hospital, etc.  So you can kind of get the picture.