Health education with creativity

Thoughts about a third world teaching hospital ‘Give people what they need: food, medicine, clean air, pure water, trees and grass, pleasant homes to live in, some hours of work, more hours of leisure. Don't ask who deserves it. Every human being deserves it.’-Zinn Medical school was bad enough. It ripped my academic genius image of myself off the wall of my mind. It stripped me naked of my self esteem leaving me with  the first three items on marslow’s theory of needs ,food ,shelter and security. Security which I barely had in a school where students frequently suffered  at the merciless hands of thieves and robbers. I barely survived. My daily prayer was to get 50% in every exam, pass the final exam and run away in one piece. I did get away in one piece but I did not have peace afterwards.  I started working in  a teaching hospital  few months after passing my final exam. On the first day I was sent to the emergency department . As soon as I...

The day the computer killed a baby. I was knocked down by a motorcycle that morning as I crossed the main road in front of the hospital to enter the premises. I hit my head on the asphalt road and lost consciousness briefly. When I came to, the motorcycle driver had fled and I was surrounded by some nurses who were also coming to work.They sent me to the emergency unit where the medical officer on duty took a look at me . I had sustained minor abrasions and cuts on my arms and face. I also had a small scalp  swelling and my vision  felt blurred, I attributed that to the cracks in my glasses .They had flown off and  hit the road  when the motorcycle sent me flying. In the end I had to do a CT scan since I had head trauma. I didn’t have the money to pay but since I was a house officer I thought the radiology department will help me out .They did not. They demanded cold hard cash. Hence I was unable to do the scan. I was on duty that morning for pediatric emerg...

Social media; A tool for democratizing health ‘An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.’- Benjamin Franklin. I was overcome with extreme gloom and great melancholy that fateful morning. A distraught mother rushed her 17yr old daughter into the ER (emergency  room) screaming for help.The girl was extremely pale and her breathing was labored. Her conjunctiva was so yellow that I picked up the jaundice from a mile away. She had been told by a neighbor that drinking a mixture of akpeteshie and camphor would cure her chicken pox in a matter of hours with no scarring from the rash. She had tried the magic potion and the results was the reason why she was in the ER Her liver was failing , she was hemolysing. We had to quickly intervene with a blood transfusion and some liver protective treatments to prevent her untimely demise. She survived but she had other problems; she could not pay her hospital bills. Her parents had no money for that.The management for ch...