Tamale (Clinic Visits)

We spent the last week assisting in clinics here, which was really interesting. My favorite parts were educating new moms on feeding their children (one of the brand new moms I counseled was only breastfeeding her infant three times a day!), performing antenatal exams, distributing flour, sugar, iodized salt, and fortified vegetable oil donated by the World Food Program, and weighing babies (pictured below).

A couple observations I made this week that I thought were interesting:

- Patient assessments are limited to "Are you feeling well?"
- There were 153 cases of malaria documented at one of the clinics in May of last year and only three recorded in May of this year, which the clinic physician chalked up to the use of malaria tests to diagnose febrile patients. (Prior to this year, everyone who came in to the clinic with a fever was diagnosed with malaria, but now they're realizing that many of those patients may have actually had other diseases.)
- Children here get vitamin A supplements, as many of their diets are deficient in this nutrient
- Only 25% of the community here is using family planning, and many of the women who use birth control get the Depo shot so their husbands don't know about it
- A large part of the work the clinics do is completed on home visits, where nursing staff goes out into the community to treat patients who may not otherwise come in for care