Different Tasks

Today the team split into different tasks.

The screening team (Jess and Daniel) performed 16 echos on adult patients in a day, which I am told is a very good pace.

Shirley, our biomedical engineer was busy working with her local counterparts on various devices and machines, making sure everything is in optimal working order.

Most others in the team concentrated on the consumables. The Open Heart International (OHI) team has brought some consumables and today we unpacked and made an inventory of them.

OHI is interested in helping to build a strong, resilient and independant local team, and this involves not only helping to build up the knowledge and capacity of the medical personell, but also helping to set up the infrastructure around them to make their possible.

A very important part of cardiac surgery are the single-use consumables. These are the medical supplies used at various stages of a patient’s stay in the hospital (medicine, canulas, tubes, syringes among many others). These are costly items that need to be available all the time. Therefore, having a good and steady supply, as well as purchasing these items at a good price is very important to the JKCI.

OHI is here to help with this too – and our experienced members that include a procurement officer are helping to put in place a good supply of consumables. Together with the local personel, they are also exploring ways to finance the consumables. At present a portion of the consumables is being donated by various foreign organizations, but over time the goal is to make the institute independant of these donations and self-sustainable.

Today’s funny pic:

Since the JCKI was built a few years ago with mostly chinese money, a lot of the equipment and signeage is in chinese, and then translated into broken English. Such as this sign above the entrance to an operation theatre that reads “BE UNDER OPERATION”