Hello from Swaziland!
After 2 overnight flights, passing through London and Johannesburg, Caren and I finally made it Manzini, Swaziland on Wednesday! We were picked up at Mashapa International Airport and taken to the Baylor Center of Excellence Clinic in Mbabane. There, we were briefly introduced to Treasure and Dr. Eric Dziuban. We actually made it there just in time for a farewell party for two of the doctors in the clinic and got a chance to see all the BIPAI staff there. We were quite exhausted that day and crashed early!
The next day was our orientation day. After running basic errands in to morning, such as grocery shopping, we got a chance to sit down and read a bit of the HIV Curriculum that Baylor has made for the medical providers here. Then, Dr. Eric gave us a brief orientation regarding Swaziland, its people and their culture, and the local thoughts about HIV here. Finally, we had a chance to discuss our projects for this internship! Dr. Eric said that there is a need for improvement in liquid ARV dosing adherence testing. He said that next week, we could talk to the adherence expert clients in this Baylor clinic as well as those at the satellite RFM Baylor clinic, and investigate what their current strategy is for assessing liquid ARV adherence. Regarding the ARV pill adherence, Dr. Eric said that the current system is working pretty well, but we will be following up more on that next week too.
On Friday, after taking the appropriate NIH training module for research with human participants, I started working on finding an official licensed English to Siswati translator to translate documents for the dosing clip study. For those of you who might have not heard about dosing clips, in a nutshell, they are small clips that are designed to be inserted in dosing syringes such that the caregiver can easily uptake the correct amount of liquid medication to give the patient. A study to assess the efficiency of these clips has been conducted in Houston, and our aim now is to conduct a similar study here in Swaziland. Of the 6 patient clients in the clinic who commonly translate for the doctors here, unfortunately none of them are officially licensed. However, I did get a chance to talk to the nurse manager to help find an official translator in Mbanane.
Well, that about wraps it up for this short week!
