Ghana Elective Placement 2024

Fourth (and final) shift at the Princess Town Health Centre. community child health, drinking from a coconut and our last BBQ and dancing!

Having packed our bags this morning we headed to the health centre for our final shift. It was a quiet start, but we were soon sent out with the RCH team again. We started with checking BP and where it was high, checking blood glucose levels. The thinking is that hypertension may be a precursor to diabetes, so by knowing the random level they can educate and where necessary treat to prevent it. We then headed towards the beach side of the town to find children to give the vitamin A to. The nurse also spent time showing us what heat rash looks like on dark skin. Really useful for us going forward as we see so little in our neck of the woods!

Everyone started to flag in the heat so we headed to the beach (with what felt like 100 children following us!) And the nurses asked some of the boys to get some coconuts for us to drink from. It was amazing watching the little boy climb the tree! He shimmied up there in no time and dropped several coconuts for us all. Then an evening younger boy got out a massive machete (it seems that they ALL have one!! 😳) And cut the top off for us.

It was very tasty, and then said machete was used again to create a 'spoon' with part of the shell and split the coconut, so that we could scoop the flesh and eat it. A real experience, fresh from the tree! We then tried some other suspect fruit and finally they bought some donuts from a lady selling them on the beach... Delicious 😋

This took us to almost time to finish. We headed back and collected a few more children on the way. After vaccinating a baby we headed back to the house for lunch and to get sorted to leave. There is a shortage of cars on the princess town side of the broken bridge so we had to wait for a bit, but eventually got there. As we headed to the car we spotted another white person (VERY rare here 🤣)... I said hi and he responded and all 3 of us were like "omg!! English" (midlands I think). He also had a mate, and it turned out that there were on the team building the new bridge and having arrived a week earlier, were going to be there until the bridge was done. That's good news for princess town, the bridge has been out for almost a year and the impact to the sick patients being referred to the nearest hospital has been big.

We made good time back, and it was time to start BBQ and dancing, especially as it was our last. It was bitter sweet. I'm really looking forward to going home, but I'm also going to be sad to leave. It's been such an adventure, and I've learned so much, what I write on here only scratched the surface. It'll definitely stay with me for a long time ❤️Baca lagi