Keira Robinsonn in The Esmeraldas Hospital as an Ectrackers volunteer

We arrived on the coastal city of Esmeraldas with a goal in mind: to investigate the workings of the Hospital del Torres and to possibly define a role for future volunteers at this hospital.
Although a city plagued with poverty, and epidemics of dengue fever and malaria, the locals don’t allow this to hinder their enthusiasm for life! They are always having a wonderful time, enjoying their music in the streets and partying on the beach! The people in Esmeraldas were so welcoming, friendly and warm despite the underlying problems. It made our stay that much more enjoyable.
Upon our arrival, we met with the director of the hospital in order to discuss our role and our week-long goals. We continued by speaking to all of the major heads of the departments, the nurses and the medical students, attending lectures and meetings and examining statistical charts and flow charts of the inner-workings of the hospital.
Regrettably, the hospital is not for the weak-at-heart. Nicknamed Hospital de la Guerra, there are many violent crime cases that are referred here. In addition, several cases of tropical disease exist. The hospital is lacking in major monetary funding from the government. The consensus of the staff with whom we spoke, is that this lack of funding is a major obstruction that has lead to serious disturbances in the treatment of patients as well as mass frustration on the part of the treating physicians and nurses. Often times, one single nurse will be left to cover four floors comprising over 50 patients. Furthermore, patients often do not possess the funds for necessary medical treatment and obviously preventable mortalities are occurring.
This hospital would seriously benefit from international collaboration, either in the form of medical student volunteers, in addition to international exchange programs with major universities or medical organizations.
There are roughly five units of specialization: obstetrics, obstetrics and gynaecology, paediatrics, tropical and communicable disease, and surgery. The hospital staff was more than willing to allow observers and in some cases trained participants in all areas. All areas require help. Furthermore, a system for the recording of necessary hospital statistics exists, but is in serious need of improvement. Statistics are entered by hand and the data are raw. There are many important missing factors and many errors in this data. An IT programmer, statistician or epidemiologist familiar with statistical software and programming is required to facilitate a program for easy entry and computation of hospital statistics. Furthermore, scientific researchers interested in anything from tropical diseases, parasitic infections, surgeries, teenage births, or miscarriages would have accessible data at this hospital. There is potential for many interesting projects that may investigate relationships between individual or community demographics, such as diet, or net income to a wide variety of outcomes. The size and manageability of the admittances to the hospital make many projects feasible.
Name: Keira Robinson
Country: Canada
Date: 30th June 2005Click here to get more information on the community