An Avocado a Day Keeps the Infectious Disease Away
Monday, May 31, 2010
The day started off bright and early with Aaron’s 5:45am wake up call. The Mashavu team got ready, ate, and headed off to Mary Immaculate Mweiga Hospital for their last community clinic. Today was an exciting day because Mary, 6 of the CYEC students, and Steve G., a WishVast student from last year, also traveled with the team to Mweiga.
The first event of the day was a health care focus group headed by Colin, Steve, and Brianna, which was attended by doctors, nurses, and community health workers from the hospital. The faculty started the meeting with a prayer, which was really interesting. Sister Veronica and the rest of the hospital staff provided invaluable information during the focus group. Their input helped the team to both identify how the Mashavu kiosk can be used best, whether it be a method of triaging in the hospital itself or a pre-hospital check-up clinic in the community, and narrow down the best way to implement our kiosks. They gave insight on how the team can best educate the community on how important health awareness and preventative treatment can be as well as who would be best suited to operate a Mashavu kiosk, someone who exhibits a good balance of trust and professionalism within the community.
The focus group ended at 9:30am, and the team immediately switched to clinic mode. They rushed to get the kiosks set-up and ready to go as the number of people waiting to be Mashavued grew steadily. The team ran in to our usually bumps and hiccups in the system, ranging from a blood pressure cuff with a severed connection on the sensor to a barely functional second kiosk for the first half hour or so of the clinic. But as always, the BioE members of the team worked diligently and got the clinic up and running on time.
The clinic started with Shengnan and Alice L. greeting the community members and running orientation. Bello and Tom explaining the process and collecting consent from those patients. Tara Y. and Brianna running education. Pat, Gill, and Rachel were on Kiosk 1 and Colin, Rene’, and Tara S. were on Kiosk 2. Samir and Alice C. conducted post-experience interviews. Jeff and Julie helped the patients travel from station to station, and Carey, Steve, and Roma were general operations.
Around 11:00am, the CYEC students joined the team at the clinic, which was a huge help. It was relatively much easier to communicate with the patients in their mother tongue of Kikuyu and Swahili. Approximately 45 community members went through the Mashavu Clinic. We noticed quickly that the average patient at our Mweiga clinic location was much different than the younger and relatively more healthy and educated university students that we were used to seeing in prior clinics at CYEC. The most notable difficulty was, without a doubt, the language barrier. Watching the clinic operators trying to explain to the patients how to take a deep breath and blow through a spirometer properly was both frustrating and quite comedic at times. These difficulties in communication led to longer Mashavu experiences for the patient and, in turn, limited the amount of patients we were able to see drastically. Even with the help of translators, the patient questionnaire and gathering of medical history, our rate limiting step, took upwards of 30 minutes for many.
At the end of the day, though, the team was able to see every community member that came to the clinic and ended the day around 4:00pm. They thanked Sister Veronica for her help and the staff for welcoming the Penn State team to their facilities for the second year in a row.
Ross and Carol left to go back home today, as well. Their medical advice and overall support and participation in the Mashavu venture were greatly appreciated by the entire team.
After everyone returned from Mweiga we have a brief meeting to talk about the specifics of the day and go over details for our trip to Nairobi and Ngong on Wednesday. The team will be meeting with important officials in Nairobi and demonstrating our Mashavu system in full on Thursday to many health care workers and ambassadors.
The day ended with some valuable down time, a celebratory Tusker, and recuperation for the fun week ahead.
