Reports from Swaziland

Yesterday was a day full of adventures. As part of one of our proposed projects, we set of to find popsicle sticks. The project we are working on was that to measure patient adherence for liquid medications. A similar project had been done a few ago in Lesotho, where a tongue depressor was used as a dipstick and held against a reading card to determine the level of liquid remaining in the bottle. However when we tried to insert the tongue depressor into the bottle, we found that the bottle neck was too small for the tongue depressor.

Thus, we set out to find a smaller stick that would fit properly – a popsicle stick! But that was much more easily thought of than found. We accordingly went to town to find these sticks which are commonly available in the US, but trying to find them in Mbabane was a huge ordeal. We tried both grocery stores in town, an office supply store, an ice cream shop, and even a hardware store with no success. Finally, two and a half hours later, we tried a small shop in a deserted, outlying area of town where we finally found wooden coffee stirrers! I have never been a coffee drinker, but I certainly appreciated them in that moment!

Another project we have been working on is to develop an algorithm to assist in the national roll out of the dosing clips. Apparently many of the clinics have already trained the staff on how to use them. We developed a method to calculate roughly how many clips of each size would be needed by each clinic base on the number of babies born at each clinic each month. Children of different ages require clips of different dosages (and thus different sizes of clips) so that was taken into consideration as well. Hopefully this will help CMS (Central Medical Store) have some idea of what to do when they receive orders for “a few clips.”

Below is a picture of Mbabane, the site of our grand quest: