Great news

Just a short one... I won at tennis today!!!

Change at work but not on the tennis court

The highlight at work this week was to find that on Tuesday morning there were no nurses! They had decided on Monday afternoon to strike for better working conditions and pay! The auxiliaries where still around along with the matrons and some of the foreign nurses but the bulk of the staff were picketing at the gate. Needless to say the dynamics of the place changed somewhat! Fortunately we had an extra doctor on the team because we were drawing up drugs and putting up intravenous fluids along with our usual tasks. Communication with the patients was also more of a struggle. The daytimes were however nothing compared to the nights, I understand. The on-call team were running around the hospital, dressing wounds in casualty, administering drugs on the ward, delivering babies in maternity and carrying out emergency operations! Meetings between the nurses and representatives from the Ministry of Health appeared not to resolve any of the issues. A solution was found on Thursday afternoon... all the nurses were sacked!! I am quite intrigued as to what the coming days and weeks will be like. The situation for the patients can only get worse! I will keep you posted.

Apart from the strike, work is going relatively well. I am focussing on the positive impact I can have on the individual patients in preference to trying to change the system. A dramatic example this week was of a man admitted with severe asthma not responding to treatment. He appeared to have a brief respiratory arrest after which it became clear that his problem was not asthma but a problem in his throat. I got the somewhat reluctant ENT surgeons to have an urgent look at him, they found a tumour in his voice box and whisked him off to theatre for a tracheostomy. He was looking a much happier chap when he returned to the ward!

I have attached some pictures of the hospital so you can get a flavour of it.

In our free time, Kit and I are managing to entertain ourselves. We have had evenings at the new cinema in town... this week we were once again almost the only ones. I hope the place can stay in business. We have nights out for dinner, and this weekend went to a proper nightclub for the first time! Maseru is a happening place after all!! We are also keeping up the tennis, after work is proving more and more difficult as the days are getting shorter and colder, but we managed a couple of hours this afternoon. Somehow Kit managed to beat me again. I hope that before we leave I can change that! The other activity of today was that we attended a Kick 4 Life event. The organisers aim to provide education about HIV and life skills in a fun environment with games including football. Children from 9 orphanages in Maseru took part in 7 aside football matches and the other activities.

I am now going off to sort out dinner... Cornish pasties of course!!

Cornish Pasties & Kit's third week of work commences

Work has begun (finally!). I am working in the ENT department at the QEII Hospital. It is a small team that I work with: 3 doctors and 3 nursing staff with some audiological experience. And that is it for the whole country… incredible!!! They work hard against all the odds – lack of equipment, space (they have only 2 small rooms and a waiting area), drugs and so on. Yet they keep high spirits and have been very welcoming to me despite it seeming that I am a bit of a Jinx. The week I arrived in January, the outreach audiology service ceased to run due to the Ministry discontinuing funding and then the day I start in the ENT department the one and only functioning audiometer (used to test hearing) in the country stops working. I think it was probably over 20 years old but still...it does mean that offering any kind of audiology service near impossible at present. Luckily I have struck gold with a doctor who has been working over here who has some funding and so a new audiometer is being purchased ready for me to collect at the beginning of June from South Africa.

Once an audiometer is in situ in the department I can really begin to fulfil my role as an audiologist. My aim is to develop the diagnostic and rehabilitation service and the patient information available. One of my colleagues is keen to visit the districts to run screening clinics and training days for local staff. These may be 4-5 day stints in the far reaches of the country and I am very keen to assist. We will need more equipment for this to happen so that is my next challenge. More writing of letters I think. It is very sad that the Ministry of Health do not seem to think audiology a priority and it is difficult not to get despondent about this. But I will remain positive and try and achieve at least some of my aims whilst here.

Until the audiometer arrives, my working day consists mainly of seeing patients requiring a medical examination for the purposes of starting school or work. They come and visit the numerous departments in the hospital to get the ‘all clear’. I do the ear, nose and throat checks...a little bit more than I am used to, but the doctors are there to assist if I have any queries and it certainly relieves some of the burden they are under with the daily influx of patients.

Two weeks in and each day holds a different experience...operations in the waiting room, beetles in ears, watching laryngoscopies and of course developing my ear-related Sesotho vocabulary a little each day.

Besides work, Matt and I are having quieter weekends based in Maseru until we return to the UK at the end of May. Last Friday, Matt attended koninginnedag (a celebration of the Queen of the Netherlands birthday) and met some other Netherlanders working in Lesotho. On the Saturday, we had been invited to run a stall at the Indian Association of Lesotho’s International Food Festival. With Helen’s help we represented Wales and England and offered delicacies such as welsh cakes, gingerbread, jam tarts and flapjacks. We sold out of all the sweets (the children were our best customers!) but sadly not of all Matt’s beef Cornish pasties...perhaps not the best choice of produce at a predominantly Hindu gathering! The sun shone and we had a fun day of sampling foods and meeting new people. On that note....I’m off to eat yet another Cornish pasty.....