Tagoni Hospital

On thursday we visited Tagoni hospital with some of the other volunteers who work there regularly. Tagoni is a private hospital here, as are the majority of hospitals. There are a few government subsidized hospitals that are cheaper for the citizens but from what nurses have told us, the quality of care goes down and the wait time increases dramatically. We really do wish that we could have visited one to see what it was like but unfortunately we didn't have any connection with one. Tagoni is so different from any hospital at home. Each ward had it's own individual building, a doctor and a team of nurses. We spent the majority of our time in the paediatric ward, as there was not much going on in the other wards and no surgeries were scheduled that day. Both of us spent a lot of time in the children's burn unit. From what the mothers and nurses have told us, since the moms cannot afford to take time off work to stay with their kids at home, a lot of children will burn themselves by knocking over a boiling pot of water. They only keep the kids who have burns less then 30% of their bodies and 2^nd degree or less. Still we both felt for all these children. The burns looked bad and they were visibly in pain, let alone the screaming that started when the nurses were cleaning their wounds. It was nice to see though that after their wound cleaning they were happy and wanted to talk and play with you. All of the kids moms stayed with them the whole time they are in the hospital. Most of the kids are in the hospital for up to 6-8 weeks. After doing the ward rounds with the doctor, Alex got the opportunity to work with the occupational therapist. She was working with kids with rickets, burn victims and cerebral palsy. He said it was a really great experience seeing how she worked with each patient depending on their condition. While Alex was there the other nursing students and I played with the children in the burn unit. There wasn't too much to do medically after the wards and I am really glad we had the time to sit down with them. I think they really enjoyed it.

On Friday and today we went back to clinic and were again in the maternity clinic. We both really love working with the moms and babies. Tomorrow is our last day there!! Time has flown since we got here. Our last project at the clinic is to make a nutritional informational sheet for pregnant moms who have really low iron. We are going to bring it to the clinic tomorrow to make copies. Every mom we saw had low iron and required nutritional counselling. We had the nurse write down some Kenyan ethnic foods to add to our list for the women. Overall the past 3 weeks have been amazing here and we don't want to leave!!