CHAD Day 2 - Doctors Rounds

CHAD Doctors Rounds differ from nurse's rounds in that we take an entire "mobile clinic" in the form of a schoolbus to various villages, and the patients come to us. Usually they have been seen by a nurse in the last week or so. The patient population is pretty evenly divided between prenatal visits and chronic illnesses. Both sets of patients have cards they bring which contains all the info about prior visits, vitals, and current medications regimens.

On the bus we had two nurses, two student nurses, several health aides, an intern, and an upper-level resident. On getting to a village they would assign numbers to the patients who were waiting. It was impressive to see how many could show up within 5min of us pulling up. The resident took care of prenatal visits on the bus (measuring fundal height by hand, and checking fetal heart sounds with just a stethoscope, no doppler!), and the intern handled most of the chronic cases, referring patients into the bus if needed. I was very impressed with the MDs' skill set. They had little kids, elderly, pregnant, whatever, just walking up to be treated. If I had participated in something like this during my 3rd year, I would have given Family Practice a much closer look, but it is too late now, so there it is.

I just want to point out how impressed I was with this intern. She was post-call, and we worked a long day. Started out at 8:30AM, did not get to our 4th and final village until about 4:45PM, averaging >2hrs./village. She worked her way through 47 patients in just under 1 1/2hrs. Amazing. We all gave her a round of applause after that.

This was a great experience for all of us. In my pictures here, we see me, Anne, and Cristina with one of the student nurses, Susan. There's a shot of me surrounded by village kids, women recieving their medicines from the bus, and the number-passer-outer guy getting mobbed by villagers who have been waiting all day for us.

I also have several pics of the flowers in the women's hair. Young, and especially pregnant women wear fresh flowers in their hair and bangles on their wrists to give off soothing smells and sounds, supposedly good for the pregnancy. I just think it loks great. And again, the saris are pretty striking at times.

There's also a shot of Susan teaching new mothers about anemia. I also show a tree nearby to where we were working. Villagers tie up and hang cow placentas in this tree to ensure their cows keep giving good milk.

Finally, a pic of an old woman sleeping nearby. I jus thought it looked nice.