Today is National Doctors’ Day. For the first time I met with Dr. S, our mentor who is stationed at the local hospital, so that we could discuss our projects so far. The other girls have been here ten days longer than I have, so I’m mostly just observing, listening, and imagining right now. I’ve gotten a little involved in late stages of one project, where we are documenting Ayurvedic preparations and procedures and compiling them in a training program manual. My skills of observation may have come too late, but I can still get my hands in the work of editing and formatting! Check the program blog, where we will be posting some of those preparation recipes. I have not tried all of the medications, but the coconut one is really delightful. It is used to soothe all manner of upset stomach, but I am concerned that it won’t work that well; if anything, it has me wanting to develop stomach pains just so that I can eat more.
Another activity today was the sorting of medical supplies, which we all brought from San Francisco in 4 big suitcases. Everything was donated to us by MedShare, an organization that sorts and ships catered packages of supplies to clinics around the world (the clinic raises money to pay for shipping and some overhead, and MedShare covers the rest). We were able to hand-pick all the items at the warehouse that MedShare just opened in the East Bay, for free, as made possible by the special relationship that MedShare has with a group of UCSF medical students. We run an organization called REMEDY, which collects unused materials from the floors of Moffitt Hospital, and then hand them over to MedShare for their wider and more specialized distribution. It's a good little system with big returns...
The amount of supplies that REMEDY is able to recycle in each week’s collection is astounding. To give you some idea of how things add up, inpatient rooms are totally cleaned out for each new resident, so the cupboards from one patient’s stay can fill a garbage bin. – All those unopened packets of gauze, syringes, and cleaning solution can be used here. Surgical floors do not autoclave their tools, so in order to keep everything sterile, all the scissors and hemostats from an operating room are discarded when the procedure ends. – With three giant autoclaves on the surgical floor here at Saragur hospital, the metal instruments will be used over and over again. Even opened packets of gauze can be made usable through a wash in the autoclave.
I am attaching a photo of the final, sorted supplies that we were able to donate to the Swami Vivekananda Youth Movement (SVYM) hospitals. As we plowed through piles of gauze, built small pyramids with boxes of gloves, and admired the silver shine and clean swish-snap of perfectly functional scissors, someone told a joke: “You know what they say? The best thing for global health would be if all the tertiary hospitals in the G-8 countries shut down!” Today’s transfer of goods was not nearly as big (or apocalyptic) as that, but it did feel like a pretty good international celebration of National Doctors’ Day.
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