work experience week / day five

It started out boring. The last day, Mrs. Peters said, is for rotating around the wards. First it was the post-op wards. By "post-op" wards, I mean "post-C-Section" wards. Everyone there was a woman that had just  delivered, and something told me said surgery was the only one that took place here. Maybe an appendectomy once in a while.

The nurse that was supposed to be around left shortly after I arrived, to go to the operating room. (I don't know why. I would say she's a scrub nurse but I highly doubt that, as there were no scrub nurses in the operating room when I was there). This meant that my schoolmate and I were the ones that had to cater to the patients' needs.
These were small, for instance, holding up the phone to a woman's ear and carrying a baby. But boy, were they annoying.


After two hours of essentially doing nothing, we were sent to the female ward to do some more nothing. I watched the nurse dress a wound, and that was it. I enjoyed reading a nice book on Wattpad, though. When lunchtime arrived, my dad and I decided to not go to Chicken Republic, where we had been eating lunch for the past workweek, save Monday and Thursday, but across the street to The Promise, and then to my dad's office.

On the way to my dad's block, a miracle occurred. We met a doctor who had plans to hold a small meeting on telemedicine at Obio Cottage, so I followed her back to the hospital and told Mrs Peters that I would not be going to the children's ward, but to the meeting, and took Dengi with me.

The meeting was a lot less boring than the wards, I can assure you that. To brief you, telemedicine is the use of telecommunication devices for the examination and diagnosis of patients, and is especially useful in remote areas, with doctors that may not be specialized. We used VSee, which is like Skype, but favored because it uses less bandwidth (so your MTN Credit won't expire too quickly) and I saw that you could share (part of) your screen (an annotate in real-time), and files much more quickly.

After the meeting (or should I say conference?) I went to another, larger meeting, that most of the staff was a part of. This was about dealing with patients' records. At the moment, they have a paper-based system, and some doctors & nurses did not handle them as well as they could be handled, and confidentiality, they were reminded, meant that nobody, not the patient's parents (unless they were under eighteen, of course), siblings, or spouse, is allowed to see the record.