Wednesday

First of all, I forgot to mention that I can now add firefighter to my resume. Dr. Addae put a candle on his stereo on Sunday and then went out for a bit. I was reading in another room and all of a sudden I smelled burning plastic. I went into his room to find one speaker a ball of flame. The benefit of bucket showers is that we have a bucket of water handy at all times, so I heroically doused the flames, saving the day.

Today involved too much time in a tro-tro. Grace and I travelled to the town of Agogo to meet with the nursing administrator of a big Presbyterian hospital. We are trying to recruit nurses for our clinics and a hospital is a pretty good place to work. We want nurses who have just retired, as there are quite a few of them and they often want to continue working, so the administrator is the person to talk to.

What we are trying to do is create a system where a medical assistant (between a doctor and a nurse), a senior nurse and several younger nurses or trainee nurses run these clinics. They will also train local people as non-professional health workers. This is “Community-Based Integrative Healthcare,” meaning that it is a partnership and the community has a stake in it. Our vision is that gradually, RUCNET will be able to withdraw from the clinics, leaving them to the communities to run. This will happen over a period of at least a few years I’d imagine. Should be interesting to come back in 10 years and see how things are going!

I’m going to sleep. Too much tro-tro-ing makes Tony a tired boy.