Hitting the ground running

This entire week I’ve spent finalizing my survey and getting everything ready to begin hut-to-hut and villager interviews.  Monday morning, I woke up bright and early and began inputting patient information and data regarding treatments, diagnoses, and other patient-specific activities of the Roche Health Center.  It’s very interesting how high the number of patients were for the first couple weeks of the center being open.  It was made quite obvious how great the need for a health center in this area was and the anticipation of the opening of RHC.  Although there is little to no follow-up on most patients, the fact that many have not had to come back for further treatment hopefully is a good sign that the two-day clinic is helping residents receive quality health care.  Another observation is that the patients are not just coming from Roche, but from neighboring and far off villages in TZ and Kenya (remember RHC is only about a 20 minute walk from the border).  Finally, it seems to me that there is some valuable information in these records but compiling it from paper records is tedious (as I have found out over the past two weeks), and so I wonder the benefit of computerizing the records into a database that Daniel (the Nurse Assistant who lives at Roche) could keep up with and once a month transfer to VLOP and SHED’s hands for monitoring and research purposes.  After talking with Dr. Esther and hearing her enthusiasm, I’m interested in pursuing the possibility further.   Evidently, no hospital, clinic, or dispensary in the entire country keeps computerized records, and as district and government officials ask for paper records, the priority is for written documents.  However, the possibility of RHC being the pioneer in moving TZ health care to a more digital phase would be so cool!  We’ll see how this works out. 

I spent much of midweek formatting my survey (which takes a much longer time than one would hope), and tweaking, deleting and adding questions and sections.  I received some helpful guidance from Rosie and Dr. Esther, who informed/reminded me of things that I just simply would not know or consider because of cultural differences.  I’m excited to receive further input from the committees, as I’m sure I am missing a few things, but feel that they survey is pretty comprehensive in evaluating satisfaction with RHC and the uji project.  This time next week, I’ll be in the field putting it to work!

On the lighter side of things, I saw my first rock hyrax on Thursday evening while on a run towards the lake.  Kyraxes are rabbit-sized rodents that can only be found on or closely around the large rocks that are scattered around the countryside of Shirati, most well-known for being on Eboke, the “mountain” behind Shirati.  They’re cool little creatures, and where we were we find multiple hyrax hanging out on top of the rocks staring at the sunset…obviously a romantic spot for the male  hyrax to bring a hot date.