Atimpoku and South Senchi Clinics

Wo ho te sen?
I started my clinic days at Atimpoku with Tim and Kylie (from Loyola Chicago). We quickly found out that Ghana's healthcare system is much more organized than I anticipated. Family planning, prenatal visits, and child welfare clinics take make up most of the clinic time.
Atimpoku is along the river and was the most urban clinic. One day, we walked around the community, visited houses, and told pregnant mothers and sick children to come into the clinic. The next day we participated in the outreach program in which we went to another small village. Here we gave vaccinations and weighed babies. Each child had a book to keep track of his or her weight, vaccinations, and growth chart. It was the most involved that we had been all week and time flew! While one of us hung the baby in a clothe bag from a scale hooked to a tree, others were giving vaccinations or taking the adult's blood pressure. Most of the babies seemed very comfortable with some random Obroni holding them; however, others screamed bloody murder at the sight of me-- yikes.

At South Senchi, quite a few more patients came into the clinic. The nurses here also involved us in their record keeping and prescription writing. They diagnosed a lot of malaria and upper respiratory infections. This clinic was also staffed with a midwife, who helped with a delivery almost every night. I practically begged her to come get me in the middle of the night sometime, but she never did.
One day while I was at S. Senchi with Anne, a 13 year old boy came in with an abscess on the sole of his foot. The nurse, Janet, started off with good disinfecting technique, but then it took a downturn. There was no anesthetic. Janet started off by cutting away the skin, which looked pretty painful, then she took a scalpel blade and jabbed it into the abscess multiple times. The boy was trying very hard not to move his foot, but on multiple occassions he pulled it back. It looked extremely painful! I had to look away for a while because he was in so much pain. When she started to clean up, she would wipe disinfectant over his wound, which was good, but then she would wipe blood from the stool that his foot was on and go back to the wound with the same cotton swab! The foot was wrapped up, the boy was given a 100mg parecetamol, and then he was given a shot of antibiotic. He would be coming back everyother day for another shot and re-wrapping.
Maa che
-- Sara