Meeting with SUZA Team
Thursday July 2nd, we had our first meeting with Dr. Salum and his second-year medical students at SUZA. We had a nice discussion with the team about our plan of collecting information and data from different medical centers and mothers. There were many questions we had to consider while discussing our plans. What problems should we target? We decided to target maternal problems including anemia, hypertensive disorders, and postpartum hemorrhaging; however, since many of the problems are interrelated, we will focus on maternal care as a whole and see what we can learn. What type of data will we be collecting? We plan on talking with different people in medical settings and collecting their experiences, preferences and ideas as our data to understand their challenges and how to fix them. How will we conduct finding our data? Our interviews will be 3-5 minute conversations with the personnel or patients. The topic of the interview will be based off of a few guiding questions, however we do not want to make a questionnaire, but more of a conversation. How many people will we target? Due to certain time constraints, we decided it was best to make teams of two (one BU engineering student, one SUZA medical student), and go to different places each day in order to reach a variety of people. In order to gain permission to enter health facilities, Dr. Salum and Asaa handwrote a letter for the Zanzibari Minister of Health. Our schedule will include data collection from 9 a.m. – noon followed by a review of our data with the team, Monday through Thursday. We’ll also have Swahili lessons from 2 p.m. – 4 p.m every Wednesday and Friday.
After our meeting with Dr. Salum, two of the medical students, Asaa and Safia, walked us through Mnazi Mmoja Hospital in order for us to experience the health setting. As Jared’s host mother said we should expect, we were greeted at the front gate by a security guard who let us in once Asaa explained our purpose. The first thing we noticed once on the site was the amount of people sitting outside. Although we did not have permission yet to go inside facilities, we were told that there is not enough space inside for the amount of people needing care. These people did not seem happy, their grim faces proved to us that they do not enjoy using the hospital facilities, and why some mothers stay home to give birth. Among the many people outside were doctors, hustling around from one building to the next, looking busy and overwhelmed by the number of patients they need to care for. The conditions of the hospital were shocking, with windows open throughout every ward allowing bugs and mosquitoes to fly in and out. During the rainy season with hotter temperatures and more infectious diseases, one can only imagine how quickly conditions could potentially spread from patient to patient. On Monday, July 6, we will return to Mnazi Mmoja Hospital to conduct our data collection.
