NHRC/WMH

The Navrongo Health Research Center, where I’m staying, is actually a pretty big deal in the world of Ghanaian healthcare. One of the first projects- and I guess you can say the project that put Navrongo on the map- was a community health project which sent nurses to actually live in the rural communities that have no way of reaching healthcare. Today, the Navrongo Project is the basis of the Ghanaian healthcare system, although implementing the community health scheme has proved slower than originally anticipated. Since the 1980’s, NHRC has moved from sociodemographic research to more clinical trials, notably a malaria vaccine trial. Thursday evening, NHRC hosted a little reception for a visiting doctor from Denmark who has been coordinating the malaria vaccine efforts. He started working on the vaccine in a laboratory back in 1978, and has made this his life’s work. The vaccine started human trials back in 2001, just for safety, but the efficacy trials are being conducted right now in Ghana, Burkina Faso, Gambia, and a few other countries and are ending this year. [Side note, mostly for my mother-- really interesting note was that there were no animal trials because there’s no animal equivalent for malaria. I guess I knew this, but had never really thought about how it would complicate a clinical trial. Apparently they tested it for safety on a bunch of European volunteers before bringing it to Africa.] The doctor seemed fairly confident that the vaccine was working, although he told us privately that he plans to retire in 2012 regardless of the outcome. In all, it was a nice evening that I think I really needed to remind me why I wanted to come here in the first place.

We hope to finish our IRB (Institutional Review Board) proposals for our research projects this weekend, which means we should be spending more time at the hospital in the coming weeks. The hospital has proved pretty hit-or-miss. There isn’t a volunteer system like in the US, so we mostly shadow the staff there. Sometimes this means watching nurses inject quinine into 50 IV bags, but in cases like seeing that birth, sometimes things get really interesting. Last week, we happened to show up as the main doctor was doing rounds, and he asked if we wanted to watch a surgery. YES PLEASE. A nurse at the operating theater found us some scrubs to borrow, and after a little photoshoot in the locker room, we got to watch two hernia repairs. Because of lack of resources, most surgeries are done only under local anesthesia, with ketamine (which I always thought of as a date-rape drug...) given to relax the patient. Again, the doctor was great about letting us know what was going on. It actually worked to our advantage that the patient was awake-- the doctor kept asking him to cough so that he could point out [ERIN KILBRIDE STOP READING NOW] the intestines bulging through the abdominal wall.

Cristina Yang and Meredith Grey, obvi

The War Memorial Hospital is a far cry from the hospitals we’re all familiar with back home. It’s composed of several wards (one-story concrete dormitories) connected by covered sidewalks outside. The grass between wards is used for everything from drying laundry to... peeing. And there isn’t really a waiting room, so people bring mats and sleep on the sidewalks. This is particularly true of the Maternal and Child Health Ward, whose sidewalk is always lined with pregnant women, babies, and grandmothers waiting for their daughters to give birth. And most strange, at least to us, are the goats that just wander around the hospital grounds like they own the place. In the Outpatient Department, goats literally run circles around sick patients waiting to be seen by a doctor. I mentioned how strange we find all of the goats to a Ghanaian, and she just laughed at me and asked “Doesn’t Georgetown have goats? Or cows?” If only, I can’t even imagine the possibilities there.

LITERALLY my favorite goat in all of Ghana. This is taken at the hospital.