News from Dr Jenny!
1st September 2010
Dr Jenny writes
So far I have spent the summer months in the mountains of southern Tamil Nadu sharing my back garden with peacocks, goats and the odd lone elephant. I have been working in a rural 60 bed hospital; Bethany Medical Centre, which is run by the Tribal Welfare Trust. This trust is an indigenous Indian charity which aims to cater for the needs of the surrounding tribal communities in the form of medical care, education, community outreach and spiritual welfare.
Part of my role there, as a paediatric registrar for Love the One, has been to develop the paediatric services. Daily I will do a ward round with the other doctors present, seeing all the children on the women and children’s ward and then progress to do the postnatal ward round in the maternity ward. Newborn education is something that I have been focussing on following on from our June teaching course. The course was well received, and I aim to implement regular hospital sessions to refresh everyone’s memory! Along with this course I have been writing protocols addressing the common newborn conditions and how to manage them, so hopefully by the end of my time here they will have a folder of useful information for them to refer to as these situations arise.
Just down the road but over the border into Kerala is the Tribal Mission school, this primarily caters for children from tribal families, next to it lies the children’s hostel which is a boarding house for children who live in remote villages and find it difficult therefore, to access education. Dr Peter Friend (a GP) and myself have been visiting the hostel and doing health checks on the children and have had opportunities to talk and share with the children, which has been an incredibly humbling experience.
Every week Peter and I visited a local village along with Bethany nurses and are in the process of defining a model for a community health clinic, primarily aimed at children. This is a slower process than anticipated as it takes time and patience to trial out different ways of working to see which is the most efficient but also most preferred by the community it serves.