After my first week of work, here's an update of what I'm actually doing here.
I work for the Ministry of Health for Dr. Moffatt, who heads the Office of the Health Inspectorate. No, this is not like the health inspectors who fail Penn dining halls. This department reviews all the hospitals and health programs in the country so it can make recommendations about what is working and not working, what needs more manpower/equipment, and conducts inspections/audits of hospitals and programs to make sure they're being as effective as they can be. I'm really really excited and this is an incredible opportunity to learn about global health from the inside. One of the basic take-aways for me from HSOC classes has been that the biggest challenge for "global health" is strengthening the health systems of developing countries, which will be sustainable in the long run, rather than just relying on aid and other projects that might be well intentioned but not as effective. Stengthening the health system of Botswana is the mission of the office I work in, so this is going to be a great learning experience.
On my first day, Dr. Moffatt gave us a list of some of the projects we're going to be working on while we're here. The first one is kind of tedious work involving excel spreadsheets, but still has been very eye opening for me. We've been reorganizing the Asset Register, which is basically a MASSIVE excel file of all the equipment in all the hospitals in the whole country, to calculate and tabulate which hospitals need equipment repaired or replaced and how much it will cost. Its devastating to see the disparities in equipment between hospitals like Princess Marina, which is the main hospital in Gaborone where the PennMed students work, and some of the smaller district and primary hospitals. I also don't think one appreciates just how much and how extremely expensive it is to build and run a hospital until everything required is in from of you in a huge table.
We finished that project today, so we'll be getting a new one on Monday, which I'm pumped about. Some of the other things I hear I'll be working on are:
- Working with the death registry because Dr. Moffatt is working on building the country's first hospice and he's doing a study trying to find out where people die in Botswana and if its really where they want to die or if it just circumstance.
- Working with him on a project about TB non-compliance. I really want to work on this project because of the disproportionate amount of brain space I devoted to TB at the end of the semester. Flashback to Paul Farmer/ my group's HSOC 10 project. I'd be again working with the death registry to see how many of the people who have stopped coming for treatment have died and how many have just stopped showing up, in which case they need to be found.
- Going on some hospital inspections and helping the department with some of the reports and assessments
I love work. Its so cool to work in Government Enclave, which is in the center of Gabs. It feels like working in DC because Parliament/ALL the government offices are there and the buildings are beautiful. People at work have been really nice too. They're a bit reserved at first, but I think people are starting to get used to seeing me in the halls, since I stick out a lot. Dr. Moffatt is a really nice and very soft spoken guy. He's actually white but his family has been in Botswana/Zimbabwe for generations. I'll also be working for his deputy, who is an extremely smart woman who used to work in pharmaceutical research. She actually helped work on a drug that's used to help people with Autism when she did her graduate work in the US, which was cool to hear.
Anyway, my first week was great and I can't wait for Monday!
No comments:
Post a Comment