Rain etc.

When it rains here, everything stops. Doctors and Nurses don’t turn up to work, but luckily patients don’t tend to turn up to hospital either. Unfortunately for us, this includes internet connections, which is why you may not have heard from us as regularly as we’d like. Still, there we are. It’s been raining a lot here recently which makes for quite a refreshing change in the heat.

In the previous post, I mentioned the exciting developments, which were supposed to culminate today in a big inter-departmental meeting in JTH with the Minister of Health, and all his heads of department in the Ministry. This was precipitated by the audit we’d done, which highlighted the need for some structural rearrangement regarding how acute admissions are handled, together with the need for increased training of the nurses and doctors, increased numbers of doctors, and increased stock of some basic life-saving kit on the wards. Sadly, this meeting was postponed by the Minister who had to go urgently to Kartoum following a bereavement in his immediate family. He should be back in Juba on Monday, so hopefully we can reschedule early next week.

Understandably this was slightly disappointing for us, but of course it’s nobody’s fault. Often I find with such things, you never know how changes in time-frame are going to ultimately work out, and it’s often for the better. We’ll see. Obviously we’ve done all the work for the presentation so we could give it at very short notice - a couple of extra days for preparation certainly won’t do us any harm either.

In the mean-time here are a couple of general photos from last week...

Views of the JTH central courtyard and main entrance.
This where we do a lot of standing and waiting for people...

My friend Dr Daniel (HO) and I in our lovely theatre hats

For all users of Google Earth (and if you’re not using it then you’re missing out) here’s the coordinates of Juba Teaching Hospital: 4°51'0.40"N 31°36'31.46"E Paste that in the search bar and it’ll fly you straight there. Juba’s all in high resolution satellite images so you can have a good look around!

James