Heart to Heart

The ICHA Blog

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Last day in the clinic by Triveni Defries on July 31, 2010 | 10 comments

Today was last day of data collection and classes at the Elmina Urban Health Center.  There were many people to say bye to and thank for sharing their time, open minds and the space of their clinic with us for two weeks.  The class ended with more students than it started with, as healthcare workers from nearby clinics and hospitals trickled in to join us. 

 

I felt that the class also ended with a general positive feeling of what had been learned and achieved. We decided to go over the post-test after all had taken it in an effort to solidify knowledge and address any outstanding questions. We went around the room as each person explained the answer to a question. This spirit of group-teaching had been echoed throughout the course – in which people would each take on teaching what they knew about a topic to open the discussion and teaching – rather than creating a lecture instructor-student dynamic. Healthcare workers continually seemed to seek us out to ask questions about the materials. For me, as a medical student who has not had the opportunity to do much teaching yet, I found great pleasure in explaining what my new, limited knowledge of medicine could add.  The course also served as a platform to start off with making health lifestyle changes amongst ourselves – talking about the healthcare worker’s own daily lives and partaking together in an exercise walk. 

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Gathering Knowledge by Triveni Defries on July 31, 2010 | 15 comments

I began my role with ICHA in the Records Office of Elmina Urban Health Center this week.  Countless green “Ghana National Health Insurance” folders and patient health record cards pass through this room. I have set up my laptop station and two friendly clinic staff members, Justice and Ernest, have generously been helping me find the patient charts over the last year so I can record information on hypertension. From this seat in the Health Center, I have gotten the privilege of a birds eye perspective – of what patients come in saying, of how their complaints are processed, of how they are diagnosed and treated, and of how their illness resolves (or evolves) over time. The flow of a clinic has emerged from this process of data collection. 

 

What it shows is a population of all ages experiencing a burden of the infectious diseases that we all imagine of a tropical, developing country.  However, I have been struck by the large number of high blood pressure readings I have seen in my own cursory glances at the data. It has not been uncommon to see a patient diagnosed with malaria and hypertension at the same time. This speaks to the “double burden” of communicable and non-communicable diseases that countries like Ghana experience. Hopefully, this data on hypertension will help shed like on the silent processes of chronic cardiovascular disease that lie below the surface of people’s daily lives.  One healthworker anecdotally estimated 5 new cases of hypertension/day in a clinic that sees an average of 150 patients per day.

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