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!!