Emergency Department- June 26

 Monday June 26


Today I went to the Emergency Department which was interesting. The ER here definitely doesn’t see that many very urgent cases (maybe two ambulances a week come) and it functions more as an ICU where they hold patients until they’re stable enough to be moved to the wards. 


They have some paintings like this. 



It is striking to see that even their ER doesn’t have that many resources, for example, last week a newborn was rushed here and they did CPR for a while but they don’t have any ventilators so the baby passed. Today, a patient had a heart defect that would require surgery but they can’t get that anywhere in Ghana and so they’d have to try to go to India or somewhere else to get the surgery (which is almost certainly too expensive for the family to afford). 


I followed one of the doctors on his morning rounds and helped with online charting and basic examination things. The most common thing was definitely malaria (often with seizures) but we also saw sickle cell, stomach bugs, malnutrition, heart murmurs, and other things. 


The ER was very full with several kids having to share beds. But, a lot were transferred to the wards because they were stable enough. 


At one point a patient with severe malaria came in (being obviously very ill) and there was not much urgency in getting her started on medication or even into a bed. A PA student commented that in the US they would have her IV lines in, meds started, examinations done, monitoring equipment on, etc, all in the first 5 minutes by a team of people, but here they waited around for a while; which I’ve heard has also been the case for other severely sick patients. I think the whole culture of medicine is different here than the US, probably mainly because of how different it has to be due to low resources and childhood death being more common. I’ll probably write of summary of my observations about this at some point. 


After the hospital we walked a little bit into Makola market and got fresh coconuts that we drank from and a mango. They cut the coconuts fresh with a machete and at the first stand we went to, the guy cut his finger a bit so we went to another stand.



We then went back home and had lunch from the hospital (really spicy jollof rice and chicken) and hung out the rest of the day. 

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