[NOTES FROM A SIX MONTHS VOLUNTEER MISSION AS MEDICAL STAFF IN A DISTRICT HOSPITAL IN UGANDA]

Abstract

In December 2014 my husband and I flew for a stay of six months in Uganda. We went there in order to volunteer in the district hospital of Kiboga, one of the most impoverished districts of this poverty stricken country. A district in which over 60% of the population lives off less than a dollar and twenty five cents a day, in which the average life expectancy is 46.7 years (9.1 years lower than the national average expectancy). Kiboga's district hospital serves the 300,000 residents of the district, of whom 20,000 live in the district capital, while the rest are mainly farmers and cattle keepers, scattered in small villages that have limited and weather-dependent access. The hospital houses 120 beds, which are divided into four wards (maternity, pediatric, male and female), and is manned routinely by one on-call local physician, who (when present) is almost exclusively occupied by emergency cesarean sections. Therefore, the majority of hospitalized patients are not inspected by a doctor at any point of their stay. The hospital functions with no running water and in the absence of a reliable power supply. The nursing staff, composed largely of people with limited or no training, is always desperately understaffed, and many of the means needed for a patient's stay (starting with a bed pan and linens and ending with many of the medications prescribed) are not supplied by the hospital. Perhaps it would have been appropriate to continue by describing unsettling data about the health infrastructure in Kiboga (such as the fact that infant mortality rate is a staggering 15%, or that nearly 10% of the districts population have HIV), however, it appears to me that it would be more educating to learn from the story of the patients we encountered.