Our First 'Week' at the Hospital

And now what we came here for - our hospital placement. We signed up for four weeks at Nyanza District hospital - a 148 bed establishment with five ambulances that serve a district of 250 000 Rwandans and fifteen health clinics. It’s main ward is maternity with around 15 births per day. It also has surgery (with a focus on obstetrics), an internal medicine ward and an HIV clinic/dispensary. As far as human resource - there are about 10 doctors and 30 nurses, a pharmacist, radiographer, dentist, physiotherapist and two Australian medical students.


We were taken under the wing of the chief of staff, Dr Marcel Polepole, a fantastic doctor who spends most his time between maternity and surgical wards. He is an amazing teacher and we are truly lucky to have him as a preceptor. For the first few days he had us mainly watching natural births, caesareans and spent a good few hours of his time running through the protocol of maternity and the steps of childbirth as well as its complications. One other good thing about Dr Polepole was that he was Congolese - which means at the hospital he spoke French and only French. Sean and I are slowly picking up some basic kinyarwanda but fortunately all the staff meetings and most conversation when Dr Polepole is around is in French.

Our second mentor was Dr Yuma - the other Congolese doctor and the training surgeon at the hospital. He had us doing circumcisions by ourselves on day three - a nifty procedure for us to know considering there are few young doctors in Australia who know how to do it. We also observed him and Dr Polepole doing a couple of hernia repairs - also quite a common procedure at this hospital.

By Wednesday I was getting pretty excited - we were learning heaps of procedural skills and it was only day three. Alas this is where my week ended, I had decided earlier that I would go to Uganda with Lara since she was down a traveling companion. And so she and I left for Kampala on Thursday, but more about that in the next post. I finished this arduous three day week on Wednesday afternoon with my first ever obstetric surgical procedure - none other than an episiotomy repair. I think for the fifteen minutes it took I was quite the novelty among the maternity ward nurses - muzungo sitting down in front of a mother 4 minutes post-partum, meticulously (OCD comes in handy) suturing away. And that was the end of my first week.