LiA Uganda - Week 5 Reflection

Like

Share this post

Choose a social network to share with, or copy the URL to share elsewhere

This is a representation of how your post may appear on social media. The actual post will vary between social networks

This is effectively the last week. This week, we went back to the mobile clinic. I think I find the mobile clinic to be the most enjoyable and meaningful experience, even though it is extremely tiring. For the mobile clinic, I was planning on working on registering the patients again, but since we had more and newer volunteers, they decided to do volunteering. On my end, I was then left with a coordinating role - that is, I would coordinate the registered patients and lead them to the 3 doctors that we had. I was also tasked with prioritizing the extremely ill, the elderly and the children. This meant that I was a "gatekeeper", allowing some to quickly get diagonized and get medicine. It was a tough and unequal task, but it was fair. For example, we had many patients do lab tests where they would be tested for malaria, HIV, and diabetes. The testing doctor in the end said over 80% of patients had malaria, and most of the patients he tested were children. Likewise, when prioritizing the elderly, there were some who were extremely weak - one had blood-red eyes who initially was lying on the floor. 

Overall, this was a time where I made a difficult decision but remained determined. Fairly, many of the young and middle-aged people complained about not receiving treatment early enough (although they eventually did), but I think in the end, the children and the elderly needed them most.

Please sign in

If you are a registered user on Laidlaw Scholars Network, please sign in