I can get frustrated!

Standards of nursing care, vary from place to place. I have sympathy for people in developing countries. Trained personnel are few; wages are low; materials are in short supply; sometimes patients personal habits are fairly low by the standards of those who have everything at their fingertips. Looking up Mr Google, the poverty line in Australia is said to be just under AUD67,000 annually. The wage of a newly graduated surgeon in Ethiopia is about AUD 500 per month. A house worker gets about AUD 50 per month.

I remember several events very clearly from my first few months in Ethiopia. I wanted to look down a patient’s throat, so I put my hand under his chin to lift it for me to inspect the inside of his mouth. He spat a glob of juicy purulent spit into my hand. Rather shocked I went out and washed my hand before coming back and trying again with the same result. It was the custom with no handkerchiefs, if you were sick a relative or friend took your sputum and wiped it somewhere, often on the wall. No wonder our walls looked like they did. But I learnt a cultural and very practical lesson.

When a second doctor joined me we made a combined effort to get the floors cleaned up. There was a layer, several, maybe five, mms thick of hard dirt ground into the floor. We got no response, until one day, walking through the ward, I accidentally put my foot in a ‘paw-paw’, their name for a bedpan. You will understand why now I never eat the fruit ‘pawpaw’. I enjoy Papaya, however.

But it made me mad. So I got the other doctor onside and, down on our knees with scrubbing brushes, we dealt with the floors of our 35 bed general hospital. I think it embarrassed the other staff as it was much cleaner after that. They talk about leading by example!

I remember a day when a new young worker was in the ward while I was doing my morning round. I was told that he had been employed as an assistant to the nurse. He seemed an affable chap. The next day he wasn’t there so I asked what had happened. There had been a patient with an IV Drip running and a tube into his stomach draining the contents as his intestines weren’t working. Without the drain he had kept vomiting. The new guy had been told that he was just to watch and learn for the first week or so. The nurse went for lunch and, on returning, was told that this patient had died. Apparently during the morning the new worker had seen someone put up another bag of IV fluid. Not content to wait , when this patient’s IV ran out, he took the gastric drainage bag and ran it into his IV line – with fatal results. What a tragedy.

I had two experiences at another hospital, which made me realise that I came from a different world. The first was when we had a Hong Kong anaesthetist for 2 weeks with me. We had got to know each other working in Australia and he came during his holidays to help me. He was an excellent anaesthesiologist. A man came in having been beaten and speared after committing a heinous act. We operated and I felt that we had everything under control, in fact, I expected a quick, complete recovery. Late in the evening I had a visit from my friend saying that he had just been to see the chap and everything was stable. The next morning he was dead. We couldn’t think of any reason why until I heard a worker say that he didn’t deserve to live, and I remembered hearing staff murmuring when he was admitted that he wasn’t worth the effort of operating on him. Judge nurse, I think had the final say.

Later I had a lady who with an obstructed labour had lost the baby, her uterus, her bladder, and needed a colostomy for bowel control. She survived after I did a colostomy and a very simple thing to drain her urine. When it appeared as if she would recover I created a new bladder out of intestine. On about the tenth day postoperative everything was going well and I took a two day trip to Addis. When I came back I went to see her and she wasn’t in the ward. They were honest enough to say that they thought that no woman in Ethiopia should live with that set up like that. So they had taken the opportunity of my absence to take everything out and send her home to die. Maybe they knew better than me, but it was hard to take.

We had many more good, rather than bad, results!