This week has involved more great learning opportunities for both me and Christine. Monday was a heavy patient load at Global Healing, so I stayed busy all morning triaging and inputting information. On Tuesday I showed up a bit earlier to the clinic, hoping to prevent getting overwhelmed by patients, and we ended up seeing only about six kids. Wednesday I arrived at the hospital to find the Preclinica closed and surprisingly few patients in the clinic. After Kristen and Charles arrived, we ascertained that the hospital workers (or some subset of them) were on strike, so we would be unable to get patient files and see patients. The strike continued until the end of the week and I am still not sure if it will be over tomorrow.
On Wednesday, Kristen gathered the social service doctors together to give a lunchtime lecture on meningitis, which went really well. While she was working on organizing that, I assisted with an American medical brigade called Hearts in Motion that was using the hospital for OB/GYN, dentist, and general internist consults. We let them use our clinic because we weren't using it, and I stayed there helping to translate and deal with patients. Probably the most interesting case that I saw this week was a woman who came to the brigade for a medical report to present to the police after being attacked. We couldn't give her a full medical report without X-rays (there was a possible fracture and radiology was closed due to the strike) and we didn't know what the form should look like, so I just wrote out a semi-official looking letting stating our findings and referred her to Woods Medical Center (on the public attorney's recommendation). I was sorry we couldn't help her more and it definitely made me realize the kind of proaction that is necessary in that sort of situation. We spoke with the woman for a while and gave her antibiotics for a possible infection of the wound site, but I couldn't leave the clinic to accompany her to find an X-ray, which I would have liked to do. Maybe that was the first opportunity I had for case management and I passed it up, but I'll try not to let that happen again.
On Thursday I returned to the clinic to find that the strike was still going on, so Kristen and Charles went to check up on kids in the day care while I did an inventory of soon-to-expire meds.
Each day after I got out of the clinic, I went to Peggy's clinic to help in the pharmacy there, and on Friday I didn't go to the hospital at all, staying at Peggy's clinic instead. Christine and I have also been working on a poster for Clinica Esperanza. It was a good week despite the strike and next week will surely be an adventure too.
This weekend Peggy and the Grubers arrived, so hopefully we will hit the ground running with a public health project before long. We have been trying to figure out where to work in the afternoons, but nothing has realized yet. This evening we will meet Howard and Alice for the first time, so I look forward to them putting us to work.I also spent a number of hours this week trying to track down a dog that bit me on the beach, but I'm not worried about it and I am getting PLENTY of medical advice!
