Low Patient Numbers, Sad Realities, and Accra Nightlife- June 9

 Friday June 9

 

This was the last day of week one!

We went to the hospital and I was in the physiotherapy room as usual.  Today we had a mix of older and younger kids and the same techniques were used as previous days. The doctor did do an assessment on a one-year-old. He said that the patient had been referred here a few months after she was born but that they didn’t come back and now her condition had worsened. 

Here’s a picture of the main toys that the kids love. One boy would start crying unless his mom put the baby doll in front of him while his legs were being stretched in the braces with a foam roller in between his legs. 

Then my peers and I had a meeting with Dr. Nyarko, one of the main doctors at the hospital who coordinates our program. She talked to us about our various shift rotations. She also told us some about the hospital. She said it’s unusual that the hospital has actually been pretty slow this month (usually this is the busiest month apparently). My peers have definitely noticed that, it’s been pretty slow and we have been done early most days. My roommate in the malnutrition ward said they only had one patient the last two days. This would seem like a good thing, but Dr. Nyarko says there are factors that hinder people from coming in, she said the economy has been bad; even though national insurance covers kids, things like transportation and taking time off work can be costly and people will wait until they're in a much worse condition to come in. Also, the rain makes the roads bad and traffic even worse so that can prevent people from coming in. But she’s still not quite sure exactly why this is the emptiest it’s been for a long time. The outpatient department (which functions as an urgent care basically) is pretty crowded all the time, but the ER, malnutrition, and surgery have been slow. 

There are definitely some sad realities here though, even with fewer patients. We did see a covered body being rolled from an ambulance into the morgue. My peer in the malnutrition ward said that a doctor did not admit a kid because they would not survive (this was over the phone, they didn’t come in). The ER has sounded a bit hectic even with fewer patients and with it functioning as more of an ICU than a US ER; a baby coded twice and the family is Jehovah’s Witness so that makes things more complex in what they can do. I think any children’s hospital anywhere would be very hard with moments like those, but especially so in areas like this that are under-resourced with high levels of poverty and limited equipment and resources for this hospital even though it’s the only children-dedicated hospital in the region. 

On Fridays, apparently, it’s the norm for workers in Ghanaian businesses and workplaces to dress in traditional clothing and our coordinator told us to expect this. I honestly didn’t notice that much more traditional clothing, but for lunch the kitchen made a more traditional meal of waakye, which was a bean and rice dish with a crunchy topping made from cassava and some plain noodles. 

That afternoon, we returned to the house, figured out some scheduling things, and rested. We had leftovers for dinner then went out to a place called Bloom Bar with a lot of our peers. We arrived around 9pm but the place was very empty and didn’t even start to get crowded until much later, around midnight it was just starting to have more of a club atmosphere. Some of our peers have stayed out later and said that it seems like Ghanaian nightlife gets more crowded around 4am! 

The bouncer made me give him my plastic Smart water bottle but he held onto it and gave it back to me at the end! I got this bottle at the London airport and have been using it to put our bagged water into (the tap water is not safe to drink and the most common packaged water here is bagged water that you cut the tip off of then squeeze into your mouth or a bottle).