Hospitals, healthcare and hospice...

On Monday the other half of the girls visited the Hospital in Zimba. Two of the girls got to deliver a baby! :) A couple of the girls started IVs and drew lots of blood work. Everyone got some good clinical experience! There were no surgeries due to a lack of an anesthesiologist, however he is supposed to be back next week. Two more girls got to travel to a beef farm and perform well baby check-ups, immunizations and blood work. Our group gets to visit the Hospital next week, which is really exciting! There were many, many cases of HIV/AIDS and a few people died overnight and there was a still birth, which was very hard for some of the girls to see.
Today we traveled to a Hospital near our compound. (About 70-80% of the patients at this hospital were dying of AIDS.) We took a tour of the wards, which we spread out among quite a bit of land. All of the wards were seperate from eachother and you had to step outside and walk to the next ward. I was really surprised by what I saw in the wards. The beds were extremely rusted and the mattresses were extremely thin. Each of the babies had a bassinet and very little sheets. The patients, who arrived first, were able to get bedding. However, if there were not enough sheets to go around then the patients had to wait on bare mattresses until sheets were given to them, following a discharge. The OR is called a Theatre and one of the nurses said that it is usually very, very busy. I am so excited to get to see a surgery! The nurse to patient ratio ranges anywhere from 1:5 to 1:50. One of the nurses talked to us about how she became a nurse in Zambia and we asked her if the nurse to patient ratio makes her job hard. In response she simply stated, "It is a little bit difficult." She never said that her job was hard, or frustrating. She just said, "a little bit difficult." I get nervous sometimes having 10 patients at one time....50 patients I can not even imagine! The Zambian people are so kind! And most of the nurses we have met are so passionate about their jobs!
We left the hospital and took a tour of the Hospice, which was extremely nice! The hospice does not hold very many patients, most of which are AIDS patients. We only toured for about 5 minutes, but we will be going back for clinicals this next week. After leaving the hospice we stopped by a village and gave candy to the children. It was a lot of fun! Tomorrow we are planning to all leave in the morning and give immunizations all day! God is keeping us busy with lots of opportunities and I can't wait to see what we are going to be doing next! :)
until next time....God bless....