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mercy ships... off ship
friday, 2nd october, 2009 |
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As well as all of the things that happen on the ship, Mercy Ships has various teams that work in various sites around the capital of Cotonou. Drew and I had the opportunity to visit these sites and see the different things Mercy Ships is involved in.
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First on our tour we had the chance to visit the hospitality centre. This is a new initiative for this year designed to increase the capacity of the hospital. We often find that our patients come from all parts of the country and sometimes from neighbouring countries. This means that they would need to stay either with us in the ward or close by for all of their post-operative follow up. In previous years patients stayed with us in the ward which sometimes resulted in cancelled surgeries for others because we ran out of beds. The hospitality centre gives us 38 extra beds for patients either post-operative waiting to go home or pre-operative who just needed to arrive early for surgery. The hospitality centre is built in a warehouse close to the ship. There are two pods housing the 38 patients and caregivers. There are bathrooms and a kitchen area. All of this was built since us arriving in Benin - at the start of the outreach this warehouse was just that, a big empty space.
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The hospitality centre also houses part of the eye team who do the pre-operative and post-operative care for all of the eye patients. Eye patients are found by our eye field teams (who we also got to visit). These teams go out Monday to Friday to different places around Contonou and Porto Novo. Each day a line of people forms and the team work through the line finding people that we can help. They start by assessing the person's eyes and then work out if they have something that we can help with by providing surgery or if we can help with giving them glasses or if we can not help them. If the person is scheduled for surgery they go to the eye team at the hospitality centre the day of their surgery to be prepared for their operation. The hospitality centre eye team also sees this patient the day after their surgery, 2 weeks after and 6 weeks after. The one day and 2 week appointments are to check their sight is improving and the 6 week appointment is to give them a laser eye treatment that helps to prevent cataracts from returning.
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Our next stop on our tour was to see the current construction site. This site is towards the border with Nigeria so we had a bit of a drive to get there. The team is made up of skilled and unskilled local people training and learning from each other, and a crew member who acts as foreman for the site. The project they are currently working on is constructing a Paediatric Orthopaedic centre in partnership with a local NGO who is going to staff and fund the project once it is built. They are building a facility that will provide orthopaedic surgeries and services for approximately 12 children per month, so 144 a year. The aim is to increase this to 215 annually but that is the long term goal. The team are refurbishing an existing structure and constructing two other buildings, one for physical therapy and one for making prosthetics. They have modified the existing structure by putting windows in each room and adding on toilet facilities, a kitchen area, a guard house and a gazebo-type shaded area for the patients to sit in. They have had to build everything about a metre off the ground with raised walkways between, as rainy season turns the site into a swamp! The main facility will have consulting rooms, a ward, an operating room and a recovery ward.
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The last site we visited on our tour was the dental site. This year the dental team has an amazing facility. A few years ago an NGO had built a maternity hospital but it had been left abandoned as there were no funds to staff the facility. When we were looking for a suitable location for the dental team the Ministry of Health suggested this place and said we could use it for the whole year. The team aims to provide dental care for 11,500 people, carrying out approximately 19,000 procedures for those affected by tooth decay, infections of the mouth and small oral lesions. They also provide dental hygiene services for people and carry out dental education in local schools and the clinic. During the year the team will have trained 2 Beninois with the skills to be dental assistants and dental hygiene instructors.
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