Laudium -- Where the journey began

As was said previously, today we learned a lot about public health, and that happened at the FPD clinic in the Laudium township. The day started out sitting in on an upper level management meeting at FPD headquarters in Pretoria where we got to see public health management in action. Basically the FPD presents a case to USAID, who funds their operations on the ground, to demonstrate what they are doing to effectively improve the HIV/AIDS treatment, and how the funds they are receiving are being used effectively. The topic of the day today was SOZO. As was explained in the previoius blog, SOZO is an electronic patient management system, that is an attempt by the FPD to move away from the existing paper based system and move to a more organized, user friendly electronic system that compiles data in a format that is actually usable. After the meeting we travelled with an FPD employee, Sive, to the clinic at Laudium. This was a very busy clinic that sees roughly 2,000 patients a month that is already completely on the SOZO system, so the task of the morning was to learn how to use SOZO. Sive, gave us a crash course in how to enter patient data into the system. It was interesting to see the system in action, and it became apparent very quickly why the electronic system was so much more efficient than the old paper-based system, the trick is just to convince clinics to put the effort into making the switch. Although SOZO is probably not the end all be all of patient management, and there are definitely improvements that could be made, it is a huge step in the right direction. Tomorrow we're looking forward to being put to work on a different FPD clinic that hasn't made the switch to SOZO to implement the system there. The second part of the morning was dedicated more to the treatment side of the clinic. We sat in with the one doctor at the clinic who saw all the HIV patients passing through the clinic. Her workload was amazing. Throughout the whole morning there were 50 plus patients in the hall waiting to be seen at all times, and apparently she sees roughly 200 patients a day. It was intresting to see the treatment methods that she used to tackle the huge patient load, and it seemed that the focus seemed less on careful individual care to each patient, and more on getting as many patients through the door and on an ARV regimen as possible. This is inconsistent with what we're used to in America, but the sheer number of HIV+ people here makes such an approach a necessity. As I said, we had a great day, and we really learned a lot. We look forward to getting put to work tomorrow. Until next time...