We Use What We Have

​Sometimes I get frustrated because we just don’t have basic equipment we need for patients. 

For example, here is the baby incubator I saw when I first got here. Yikes. I was planning to scrub it down with bleach myself. 




Then I saw we had a better one, but it still made me nervous:



And then 2 weeks ago we got this amazing one:

I was very excited we got a donation of state-of-the-art medical equipment. 

There are a lot of other things I hope for here.

The thing is, sometimes the hospital isn’t ready for new tech. I’ve been on a bit of a soapbox about us getting more lab test capability. We have CBC, POC Glucose and urine pregnancy, Total bili, malaria smear, and urinalysis without micro. 


We have a TON of cirrhosis, alcohol withdrawal and altered mental status patients. I’m working on a sepsis protocol because we have so many deaths from sepsis. But we can’t check lactate, sodium, potassium, calculate anion gap, creatinine, LFTs or anything else for critical patients. We had an alcohol withdrawal /- other altered mental status cause guy last week and I immediately asked to send a sodium level to the bigger hospital’s lab, but the staff wanted to wait til the next day. And then the result came on the 3rd day. Sodium 120, potassium 2.8


We had multiple hypertensive emergency patients last week and couldn’t check any crucial labs. 


We had a hypotensive but volume overloaded diabetic and renal failure gal last week with rising glucose to the 300’s and no way to check her creatinine or potassium, control her blood pressure or keep her out of DKA. We also don’t have IV insulin. 


SO. I really want some of these labs to be able to be done on site. But, the admin team doesn’t want the staff to have to learn to use new equipment. Alas, alack. 


I still presented the idea to the fundraising and grant team. They then told me the admin team separately told them they don’t want extra lab tests because: we are a primary care facility. 


But I still think they’re important. Because I don’t think the cases and pathology above are only primary care. If we are going to have emergencies and sick inpatients, I want us to have the chance to meet the challenge. 


We will see! 


(Also, our EKG machine still uses suction cups for the leads and will only read 10 of 12 leads for some reason. So we make do with 10 🤷🏻‍♀️)

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