Practicing For A Disaster

The start of the hectic week has just began. As soon as I arrived at the RHU last Monday, the entire place was already packed with people trying to donate blood. Of course, the teachers and barangay captains are waiting for me to start our Community Health Allies and Reform Team Consultative Assembly. It was a very productive meeting. I was able to convince the participants to support my pet project of Alkansiya for the pregnant mothers. The objective was to make the pregnant mothers save for the expected baby and the expenses to be incurred during their delivery. They assembly called it Alkansiyang Pampamilya and gave birth to the project through an Assembly Resolution. The group was also sold out on the idea of implementing a User Fee on some selected health services. In fact, during our Local Health Board meeting with the Mayor later that afternoon, he himself was contemplating of making the ambulance exclusively free only for indigents. He himself had to admit that making it free for all is not a sustainable project. Having said that, we were able to start the process of lobbying for a User Fee Ordinance in the municipality of Candoni.

I was supposed to be in Iloilo considering that it was the third Monday of the month. But I had to be in my area of assignment. There were a lot of things to do, especially in preparation for the coming evaluators this Friday. I had to come back to Bacolod today just to have some of the pictures printed and to attend the consultative meeting at the Provincial Health Office tomorrow. Yesterday afternoon was also the start of our Echo classes. All of the seminar and trainings we have attended for the past few months have to be echoed back to the other staff who were not able to attend the trainings. One of the trainings we attended was the Health Emergency and Disaster Preparedness Training. After the didactics, the staff experienced a simulation of a disaster and were able to practice how to respond to a disaster.

There was one funny moment while at the Emergency Department. A "victim" was labelled having chest pains and difficulty of breathing, suspect multiple rib fractures. Out of panic and due to so many "ususeros" (who were also students encouraged to act as ususeros), the medical team at the E.D. placed a splint on the lower left leg, a leg which was neither fractured nor injured. We were all laughing during the debriefing.

This afternoon they were supposed to have the echo lecture on Newborn Screening, especially on the inborn errors of metabolism. A week after the Area Meet, another lecture on FHSIS.

It is definitely a hectic week. While some of my fellow doctors to the barrios are thinking of how to spend their forced leave already, I am still thinking on how to survive my last one and a half months in Candoni RHU for the year 2008.