SWB

Hi everyone! Yes I am alive. Sorry about the lack of blog posts. It was a combination of being busy and lazy and also fb, hotmail and gamil all made it very difficult to log into my accounts because they were suspicious I was logging in from Rwanda.

I arrived in London this morning, but will make a few blog posts about Rwanda to catch up and reflect.

Firstly, To explain the project I was on: SWB (I won't give its full name because I don't want my silly blog posts coming up everytime someone googles the organistation).
Its essentially a bunch of doctors who come across to Malai and Rwanda and teach the surgical and medical registars for a week. There are very few specialists in Rwanda to train the junior doctors, so they really appreciate this teaching and the project is being expanded to include Burma as well next year.

There are a lot of arguments people make agaist foreign aid and the way it is delivered but this is a very clear cut method of giving aid. The doctors provide an education for students who would not otherwise recieve it and are then able to utilize what they learn to benefit their patients and the country's healthcare at large.

There was two days of intensive conference like teaching with lectures in the first half of the day and tutorials in the afternoon. With 20 specialist consultants on the trip- topics were covered in a very short time frame.

There was a lot of conditions that you do not see in Australia like TB complications (but you see in our exams of course), Ebola virus etc. Also management that the doctors were teaching was vastly different with 3 CTs to service the 8 million people of Rwanda and only one of those in  a public hospital.

The doctors who came on the trip were remarkable having had vast experience in devloping world medicine particularly in the Asia Pacific Area but also many holidng professorial and high positions within their hospitals in Australia.

I think the kind of teaching that was delivered couln't be done by any doctor. The teaching was useful to the doctors of Rwanda because it was concious of the resources that are available to them and given by doctors experienced with working in such resource limited areas.

I don't think I'll ever forget the ENT surgeon explaining how you would open up a paper clip to remove insects from someone's ear and how to determine how far you can go before harming the ear drum. Or the Rwandan doctor who said he usually pours petrol in to kill the insect first before bringing it out.
A few photos from seminars