How many patients can you see in one day?

2/24/09

Yesterday I went on another campana. This one was significantly further away…we got there on motorcycles, locals say it’s about an hour and half walk, which is probably 2 hours for those of not used to walking those distances. It was beautiful in the morning and we were put in a building adjacent to the school. It started nice and slow, but by lunch time we were swamped. It was just family after family…most families were 4 or 5 people. Most people came with complaints of headache, colds, diarrhea, or heartburn… not very complicated, but with the amount of people that came in, it was hard to be thorough or do much more besides give out a ton of Tylenol. So much for education. I was the only doctor that went, but thankfully to medical technicians also saw patients. I think I’m the only one that actually examined any of the patients and I’m pretty sure I also give out the least amount of antibiotics. We finished around 6:30pm and by that point it was raining, freezing, and our room was dark and I was glad to be done. Feeling pretty strongly that this is no way effective or good medicine. I can’t get an exact number of how many patients we saw…but somewhere around 200…crazy.

Today my home visits were thwarted by the threat of a supervision visit by the ministry of health. I spent the morning seeing patients with one of the fill in docs. He’s pretty cool, so the morning went fast and there was yet again someone for me to stitch up. In the afternoon, we had a capacitacion (training) on how to do a sesion demostrativa (educational demonstration). It was specifically about how to teach pregnant women and mothers how to prepare well-balanced nutritious meals. The idea is to give them a talk, but then to have them actually prepare four different meals – for children age 6 – 8 months, 9 – 11months, 12 months +, and then for a pregnant woman. So after we got our talk we prepared the dishes. It was good hands on learning. We are going to do something like this next week with the nutritionist and pregnant women so we’ll see how it goes with a real group.