Chikankata Mission Hospital
We spent Thursday and Friday at the second most prestigious AIDS research hospital in Africa, Chikankata Mission Hospital. It was a beautiful area and we were all impressed by the facilities and staff. There is also a nursing school on campus that we were able to tour and even sit in on some of the classes. I spent my first day in the antenatal clinic with Emma and Veronica, two of the midwife students studying there. Emma walked me through a head-to-toe assessment of a seven month pregnant woman, explaining everything she was doing and why she was doing it. She showed me how to feel for the fetal heart and the different parts of the baby. I was able to examine the next woman on my own and spent the rest of the time talking with Emma and Veronica about their lives. They each were married with with six and three children, living almost six hours away from home and living on campus. The program is a year long and visits are very few. I can’t imagine being away from my one year old baby girl, husband, and five other children for a year! They asked me about my life in America and were both extremely enthusiastic about loving “Obammmma!!” and Michelle. But that is not an uncommon sentiment among the Zambians here. They even have chitenges with his face on them *I’ll try and find a picture*
We were very lucky to be able to sit down with the community health organizer for Chikankata Hospital and listen to speak on what the hospital is doing to reach out to the community. I was shocked to find out that the population that the hospital covers is near 96,000 people! For those 96,000 people there is only one hospital. For that one hospital there are six rural clinics and each rural clinic has ten health posts. That information alone was outrageous, but he went on to talk about the awful terrain is and how the land cruisers that they use to go out to the villages only last four years a piece because the roads are so bad. This makes it extremely difficult to reach villagers in a beneficial time frame. He kept mentioning “the valley” that was about 70 kilometers away but takes six hours to get from there to the hospital! The valley people are the most impoverished and need people because when the hospital was built they were moved from their homes and placed in the valley, leaving them with little to no access to health care.
I was also surprised to learn that all of the workers at the rural clinics and health posts are volunteers. Each health post contains two hospital trained community health worker volunteers. The hospital takes the village workers back to Chikankata for a six week intensive training health course. I was most interested to learn about the traditional birth attendants that the hospital trains. They go out to the villages and find the grannys and other older women that most of the women in the village visit to deliver their babies. They take these women and give them a six week course on safe delivery practices, warning signs, and how to better care for women in labor. Listening to him talk, I could not help but think that someday I would love to be one of the health care workers teaching these women about labor and deliver…
