An Insider's View

I spent this week at the Save A Life Center, a non-governmental organization ran by The Zambia Project. This Center focuses on malnourished children. Parents/guardians come once a week to pick up food for their child in order to facilitate a full recovery from malnutrition. The children are also weighed and their progress is closely monitored. Parents/guardians are also supported and taught how to successfully run a business and make earnings to ensure that they solve the root problem as to why the child was malnourished from the beginning. Aside from this, they also send team members out to the child's home to asses their living environment and ensure the food is being used appropriately. They also provide homes for orphaned children with 8 children to one mother and aunt. In addition, they run a school with 500 children attending! And last but not least, they have a clinic used for regular checkups of the children and walk in appointments.

I was very grateful to be able to spend some time in such a wonderful center and be a part of something life changing. As much as I enjoyed my time at the hospital, it was a good break and felt more like home (well maybe just a little). I spent my first day going on home visits to check up on the children in the program. Seeing the insides of these homes was an experience like no other. Most families live in small huts made of straw with a tin roof. The insides were tight but often had a mattress to sleep on, couches or chairs and one even had a tv and a deep freeze. A large part of the home visits was making sure these spaces were clean and safe for a child. Most of these homes were, and the children appeared to doing well. Although I noticed a lot of broken glass in the sand and can't imagine how many children cut their feet as many of them do no have shoes. On a separate note, I have to commend these workers that walk through the deep sand in direct sunlight daily, navigating the town without any street names or signs.

After this, most of my time was spent in the clinic as I lucked out because I happened to be there the week that they were doing checkups with all 500 school children. I was lucky enough to be paired with one of the two amazing doctors on site and assessed the children's ears for blockages and perforations, their heads for ringworm (a whole lot more common than I had imagined) and doing HIV tests on new students, including the baby class (kindergarten). I found out pretty quickly that our scope of practice is a little different here as the doctors had us assessing and prescribing treatments for these children fairly independently. Aside from the school house checkups, we did assess some walk in patients and I was always paired with a doctor for this. I was so amazed to see how the doctor was able to diagnose a patient based off of Q&A alone. I was especially amazed to see a patient come in complaining of heart palpitations leave being sent to the hospital to confirm a diagnosis of an ectopic pregnancy. These doctors work with so little and are able to do so much. It really made me realize how much we rely on diagnostics in Canada and made me wonder how many Canadian healthcare workers would be able to do what I was witnessing these doctors do daily.

Although I am sad to leave The Save A Life Center, I am excited for my next placement in the labour and delivery ward at LGH, wish me luck!

-Kristen Monz

http://zam.co.za/projects/save-a-life-centre/

Hope Art

A Hallway Highlighting The Children's Recoveries