Tema Hospital

I woke up at 3 am this morning to drive to Tema, Ghana. Tema is just outside the capital city Accra. Kenneth, his family, and I had a 3 hour drive to the General Hospital. We arrived early enough to have a quick breakfast before meeting with the staff at the hospital.

I’m realizing there are many communication problems with the programs. I think it’s probably due to cultural differences and then Ghanaians like technology but they just have not mastered email communication yet!

The P.T. department thought we were going to arrive yesterday, and we were told no one would be at the hospital due to the New Year holiday. Also, they thought we were here just to deliver equipment. We actually have very little donations to provide and instead are donating our time and knowledge.

We got it all straightened out luckily and they are still very happy we are here. We broke off, where each one of us shadowed and Ghanaian therapist. I mainly spent my morning with the therapist that was doing initial evaluations on patients. I sat with him for 2.5 hours. I only saw 1 full evaluation and the start of another eval. People were constantly interrupting him and so the eval took forever. The therapist seemed to have pretty good P.T. knowledge! He was trained at the only Ghanaian P.T. School. He appreciated my insight.

The first person we saw was a lady who had a partial hip replacement 7years ago after a motor vehicle accident. Over time her acetabulum (hip socket joint) wore out from a too large prosthesis being placed at the femur (thigh bone). The revised her surgery and had a total hip replacement. The x-rays showed a much better ball prosthesis for her socket size. I’m assuming they probably only had 1 prosthesis size 7 years ago, and not that it was doctor error. It seems like they rely on a lot of donations so something a lot of times is better than nothing.

The next patient we saw was a stroke patient. She had a recent stroke. The therapist had to leave the room so I went ahead and got started on the evaluation. I then was shortly ushered out of the room for a ward tour. They have 9 wards, but rarely get referrals from the doctors to see patients and so many people just lay in bed all day even though they would be excellent therapy candidates. Tomorrow when we are back at the hospital, we are going to try and do a lot of education to help them make their case better to the doctors. Once the doctors here realize that P.T. helps their patients recover faster, I’m sure they will start to embrace it. However, that takes much time!!

Afterwards we went to lunch that turned into dinner since they were so slow!! I am staying with an American couple that has been in Ghana for the past 17 years doing missionary work. Once I learn more about their organization, I will write more about it tomorrow night. They have outfitted their home like an American home so I am very excited to sleep in it tonight!!! She made us a delicious lemon cake! It was so nice to have American food!!

I do not want to be rude to my hosts so I am going to stop writing now. Tomorrow I will try and elaborate more on the Tema P.T. program and my host family for this week.

Love, Kari