Catch up...

 Squashing a lot in...

How to fit a large immunisation cool-box in a small hospital Suzuki...

Time to catch up as Ian has been away in Kampala for a week speaking on Ebola/Marburg at the Uganda Maternal & Newborn Hub meeting in Mulago on the Monday; visiting WHO Country Office on Tuesday and then attending the Uganda Medical Association conference in Jinja at the end of the week when he gave a talk on Integrating Patient Safety which was well received.

Back to a busy clinical schedule as Dr. Josephine, our other Paediatric Consultant, is on leave/days off.  Thankfully we have an excellent visiting registrar from N Ireland, Lynne Speirs, who is a great help.  We have just had the national intern change over so now orientating the junior doctors in their new specialties.  Unfortunately due to national financial constraints, we have no new doctors posted here so will be running with six instead of eight interns.  However we are happy to have some visiting doctors from UK, Michaela who is here until December, and Richard & Katie with us until July.  We also have welcomed Nadia, a neonatal nurse from CMS New Zealand for 3 months.

Prior to the Kampala trip Ian had represented the hospital at the regional Independence Day celebrations, the only muzungu (European) in a large crowd, a somewhat amusing scenario as some of the songs were celebrating the departure of the Brits!

Mental Health team from Cheshire & Wirral partnership trust

Hanna remains very busy with her more-than-full-time role in Maternity and also running the Guest House plus providing a lot of hospitality to many visitors.  We enjoy the comings and goings of people from all over Uganda and overseas that enrich our community here.

We had a good AGM of our Kisiizi Health Insurance scheme with about 150 group leaders representing over 36,000 members.

Dr Josephine, Dr Gabriel, Justine, Dr Bruce and Bowers planning HIV programmes

There have been many late into the night meetings to try and organise a budget for our HIV services as these have been re-organised due to the political fall out in Uganda where USAID suddenly dropped its links to our previous funding channel.  In fact it has been a good thing to review the programme and draw up new targets.

Now we have a plastic surgery camp this week working on infants with cleft lips and palates. We have a visiting team of two radiographers from Chester for a fortnight and we have a biomedical engineering technician conference here on Saturday. The following week we will have our Board of Governors meeting and then a paediatric team from Bwindi Hospital will visit at the beginning of December.
The list goes on... a bit like homework!