Going on a Campana

2/21/09

So I spent the rest of this week making a stab at home visits of pregnant women. Our home visit team consists of Vania, Rebecca, and I. We are just finding it hard to actually find the women and their family members at home. The idea is to not only visit the pregnant women, but also her family (husband, mom, mother-in-law) and review the emergency signs of pregnancy and labor and then also address other health concerns they may have, especially about their children’s health. And we wanted to teach them on a second round how to make their own oral rehydration solution. Anyway, we’ve only found 7 of our pregnant women. The one’s we have found have been nice and open to what we are reviewing and all have said they are willing to be transferred to a referral center if needed, so that’s good. So we start again on Monday to see if we can find some more pregnant women.

Today we went on a “campana”. A campana is when the team responsible for a certain sector of the outlying communities goes out to them to see patients. It is, I suppose, their attempt to get out to the communities, so people don’t have to come in to the health center, since most of the communities are anywhere from a 1 – 3 hour walk away. I think it could be a good thing if there was any continuity/consistency in the staff that was responsible for the different sectors. This mostly felt like any band-aid campaign, where people come in with pretty typical complaints of colds, diarrhea, heartburn and mostly just want medicine to get by…there’s not much time for education. The good thing is that they are connected to the health center so if there was something serious they could follow up. I don’t think they can fix this until they fix their staff turn-over problem. It was really beautiful on the way down, the way back was a good 45 minute walk up the mountain to a part of the road where the clinic car could pick us up. And I came home with a seriously itchy rash on my arm, as long as it’s not scabies, I’m ok.