Ray of Hope

On Friday June 17, I joined other healthcare staff of the hospital for a conference in Accra, the capital of Ghana. This was a Methodist health professionals conference and since the Ankaase hospital was founded and is being managed by the Methodist Church, it seemed appropriate for representatives from the hospital to attend. The Ghana Methodist Health System consists of 2 hospitals and 19 clinics. The conference was scheduled to begin at 9am and Accra is 5 hours south of Ankaase so the hospital decided to get a bus and shuttle us to the conference. We were told the bus will be leaving from the hospital at 3:30am. Fortunately (I’m being sarcastic), I did not have electricity in my house so I decided to wake up at 1am and get ready.  Electrical outages are common occurrences here. It was also raining furiously at the time. We are currently in the rainy season and it rains almost every day. Because of the rain and the darkness on the dirt road leading from my house to the h...

Almost 2 months ago (April 18 blog post), I wrote about a 15-year-old (Jennifer) with a 4-month old baby who was admitted to the emergency unit and stayed over a month. The baby had staph infection with huge wounds on both sides of the chest area, just above each clavicle. By God’s grace the baby recovered and the wounds healed perfectly. Mother and baby were finally discharged on Friday, May 31. After discharge, Dr. Nkansah (ER physician), Clements (Physician assistant) and I took them to their house. We wanted to assess the condition of the place where mother and baby will be staying. Due to extreme hardship, Jennifer’s mother rents a 12-feet by 12-feet room and shares this place with 5 of her kids (she has 7 children). Jennifer and her baby joined them in the already cramped space. The room had one window that was poorly placed thus, ventilation in the room was also very poor. The outside environment where the kids spent most of the time was also in a bad shape with trash and stagn...

On Saturday May 28 we cleaned up a section of the hospital that was used to store medical supplies in the past. A new store was built for medical supplies as a result of increasing need. Therefore, most of the usable items were moved to the new location. However, some of those items left behind were also usable. But due to lack of training in the usage of those resources, they were left behind. There are 2 rooms full of stuff but we had time to go through just one.  In a few weeks’ time, we shall go through the other room. We were very fortunate as most of the items were still usable. The plan is to arrange all the usable items and catalog them in a proper manner. This will enable ease of access when the need arises. Below are pictures of the project. Condition of the room before we began sorting it out. A different view of the same room. It was really packed with stuff. Sorting it out.  Usable medical resources. We have already used some of this f...