Heart to Heart

The ICHA Blog

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Doing well with what you have by Peter Teichman on July 31, 2010 | 3 comments

There’s making do with what you have and doing well with what you have.  The staff of the Elmina Urban Health Centre do much more of the latter.  

 

Foregoing the excess packaging and attendant disposal requirements of individually wrapped band-aids, after a blood draw, patients are given a swab of unwoven cotton torn from a forearm-length bolt.  Before their blood is even drawn, a piece of IV tubing suffices for a tourniquet.  The plastic tubing offers an unintentional integrated safety mechanism.  It snaps if pulled too tightly.  For blood samples that must dessicate before or after staining, louvered windows, placed to catch the scant from a clinic courtyard, can be tilted to become a perfect drying shelf.  For those serum tests, like typhoid, that must be rocked and checked for agglutination, a ceramic floor tile is an excellent tool.  Its white surface provides a contrast with serum or whole blood, and its adsorbent surface assures neat mixing of serum particles.  Economically placed, up to 35 samples can fit on a single tile. 

 

In our home hospitals and clinics, with their myriad specialized gadgets, it’s easy to forget that things need not be purpose-made to be useful.  Indeed, pressing everyday articles into sophisticated uses reflects and cultivates a versatility of mind that is priceless in any setting.

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Doctor, heal thyself! by Peter Teichman on July 16, 2010 | 1 comment

As happens everywhere, health care workers share lifestyles with their clients.  It's just one of the features of community health.  Into the raucous joy of Ghanian life, are creeping some less healthy habits.  Minimal exercise and fatty food additives are two main culprits.

 

Our visiting team has been treated to high fat, high salt snacks washed down with Coca-Cola after presentations of Preventing Heart Disease and Diabetes Mellitus 2.  The irony isn't lost on us, nor is this counter-productive situation unique to Ghana--just look at the foods served at Western medical conferences, and the American Academy of Family Physicians decision to 'partner' with Coca-Cola to produce patient education materials on healthy beverage selection.  The point is, often, patient education and community health improvement begins with the messengers.

 

Doctor, heal thyself! applies to both the Ghanian nurse covering her salad in dressing and the American doctor snacking on cream puffs at a Cardiovascular Disease conference.  Addressing health care workers' choices are excellent starting points for changing the choices and health outcomes of a community.

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Little Changes can make Big Differences by Peter Teichman on July 16, 2010 | 7 comments

The patients and staff of the Elmina Urban Health Centre reinforce the concept that happiness is found more in personal and community connections than in having things.  This has a lot to do with how the staff at the health center were able to create and continue a sophisticated health system, complete with efficient patient flow through multiple care stations.  At each step of their visit, patients are warmly welcomed--connected to their providers and this community center. 

 

For someone who spends the majority of his professional time in patient consultations, I was very impressed with how the laboratory (typically, a faceless entity to Western doctors) contributes so much to patient care and community building.  With early use of inexpensive point of care testing, lab personnel are ably to quickly and accurately diagnose malaria; enabling rapid treatment and decreasing unnecessary antibiotic use and subsequent malaria resistance.  Malaria is a (likely, the) leading diagnosis at the Elmina Urban Health Centre, and simplifying the care process saves patients much time, enabling them to return to their daily activities and freeing the health care team to see other patients, a reverberation that decreases their waiting time too.

 

Little changes can make big differences.  Those changes are happening now at the Elmina Urban Health Centre.