You've been privy to the thoughts inside my little oval
head. You've let me talk about sleeping
next to hippos and drowsing in kayaks.
But what do I actually do? Why
did I leave a job, city, boyfriend, and move to Uganda?
Because this is the coolest shit in the whole world. Malaria, HIV, Ebola: Infectious diseases make me hot and
feverish. I love having a forseeable
impact. The strongest core value that I
bear is that health is not a privilege but a right. But also, I find the science incredibly sexy.
I moved to Kampala to work on Malaria. I am doing a randomized control trial with
150 facilities in 17 districts spread all over Uganda. The trial is 3-tiered mentorship project with
the ultimate goal to increase testing for malaria and decrease non-adherence to
test results.
In other words, when a patient comes in with a fever, test
that patient for malaria before just prescribing anti-malarials. If the test comes back negative for malaria,
believe the test and do not continue to prescribe the patient
anti-malarials. Overtreatment of
anti-malarials has 3 main negative effects: 1) The actual cause of sickness is
not addressed and you are sending a patient home who is still stick, 2) You are
wasting money and precious antimalarial drugs, 3) abuse of anti-malarials can
lead to drug resistance, and guess what people, we don’t have another drug on
the backburner. Scary stuff.
I helped train the 9
master trainers recommended from the ministry to train the 70 clinical mentors
from the 17 districts to mentor the 300 mentees (clinicians) in their district facilities. My first part of the job was heavily field
based. Traveling to clinics, teaching
people how to collect the data and training the mentors. The project officially rolled-out last month. Now my main job is to watch the data roll in
and analyze it so we can troubleshoot. I've
become a wiz at excel. Pivot tables are
my slaves.
The study will continue for a year at which point we’ll
write up the paper and recommend a national scale up of the mentorship project
to the Ugandan Ministry of Health.
SO
NIFTY, RIGHT?