Today was my first full day at the hospital. I am going to spend a couple of days learning the differen departments of the hospital, observing what they do and how they tie in together. Then I will start in the accounting department. One of my first jobs will be to set up the new "peanut butter" venture. They are starting a program that is making peanut butter with vitamin additives. The peanut butter will be used to fight the child malnutrition that is a serious problem - particularly in the villages.
We arrived at work at 8:00 to 250 people already waiting to get in for thier appointments, etc. By 11:00 they had signed in 500 people. I spent the morning working and learning in "records" with shelf after shelf of patient files - the ones that were green files were (HIV) positives and the ones in pink were there for another medical reason. the green files were about 4 to 1 to the pink files. It was a madhouse as they tried to serve all those people! Both waiting rooms were full and people were filling the walkways outside. I thought that most of the children were there with thier parents - but I was told that many of the kids were there because they were positives. It broke my heart. There are five doctors on staff to deal with all those patients. Many of them are "check-up's" on existing paients - but they had 147 new patients today.
After records I came home for lunch (we have both a driver and a cook) then back to Faith Alive to work in the pharmacy. The drug storage space was either bins on the floor or shelves made of wood and cinder blocks. Again I was blown away by he number of people they were serving. They fill 500 prescriptions a day - unfortunately they are so busy they don't really have any time to consult with thier patients. The situation is further complicated because they have to log all of those prescriptions into a journal by hand because they do not have enough computers to be able to computerize the process.
Atg 6:00 I was pulled out of pharmacy and went to help Dr. Chris as he saw his patients. He lets me be very interactive with all of the patients. He saw one patient - a "positive" he had put on HIV drugs awhile back. She had started experiencing weakness in her legs and some other things - so she went to another "doctor" The doctor pushed on her stomach a few times and told her that she hade hepatitis and then on the medical referral wrote cancer of the liver. He then gave her some ineffective drugs and charged her $600 (american). Dr. Chris was livid - because she was hustled - big time and as a widow with a child - she could