A Farewell to Charts
Having finished our last full week in Swaziland, we presented our work before the Baylor Clinic staff during the Friday Healthtalk. We explained that the COE was going to start using the dosing clips alongside the CHAI sponsored clinics and taught the staff how to insert and remove clips from the syringe. We will be working with the Baylor doctors this week to develop an ordering and tracking system for clip and syringe distribution in the clinic. Hopefully, the clinic will soon procure syringes so that clip distribution can begin. We will also try to determine what should be done with the extra Nevirapine and Kaletra syringes that come with the medications and will need to be removed before the medication is given to the patient with a syringe and dosing clip.
We will also be piloting the liquid medication dipsticks this week. During the presentation, I had one of the expert clients in charge of performing adherence come up and demonstrate how to use the stick and reading card, which she did with no problem. Hopefully, this will make her and the other expert clients more receptive to using them in clinic.
The extended charts are ready to go in case we get an appointment with the MoH. If not, we are hoping to submit them to the SNAP materials coordinator for further submission after we leave. Once we finish creating job aids for them, our projects will ALL have reached some level of completion!
Yesterday, we had the opportunity to see some cave paintings that were 4,000 years old – certainly the oldest paintings I have ever seen. The tour guide was a girl about my age who lived in the hills where the paintings were. She led us down a ridiculously steep path covered in loose rock in flip-flops! After explaining the paintings to us, she started asking us questions about ourselves. In turn, we wanted to know a bit about her. She was the first person I had ever met from a polygamous family: her dad had five wives. We found out that she had applied to go to the university and wanted to become a teacher. It was a pleasant surprise to hear that someone from such an outlying chiefdom even had the opportunity available to her. I really hope she is able to fulfill her dream.
Here is one of the paintings that shows something rare to find painted – a wildebeest:
