Gratitude

After only a little over a week in Namibia, I already have quite a list of things at Geisinger that I'll feel very grateful for once we're back in the US.

The lab, which I used to think took too long to bring back "stat" labs, ranks high on the list; here even stat labs take at least 24 hours. This morning I found a BMP (UTE here) in our stack of morning labs - drawn on Friday morning, the report had been printed days later, on Monday morning, with two critically low values* and an automated notation to "Please attend to this value urgently." I may give "critical lab Tiffany" a hug when I get back to Pennsylvania.

Bed lists, which are such a routine thing at Geisinger I'd never even really thought about them before, are another thing I'm thankful for. That "urgent" lab I mentioned didn't come labeled with a room number -- just a patient name. There is not any readily available list of which patient is in which bed, so I spent a good portion of the morning trying to figure out which room contained that patient with the now long-deranged electrolytes. I think someone finally decided he belonged to the gastro ward down the hall.

Official radiology reports are another thing that I'm thankful for. Wet reads too. We have a patient here who has some interesting neurological findings (stay tuned for a morning report once I'm back,) so someone had ordered a CT of the brain. We knew it had been done, but for days on end the plan was "Pursue results of CT." All of our potential treatments and further workup were on hold for that. Finally on Friday someone assigned a nursing student the job of physically tracking down the radiology report. Less than an hour later, we had our answer - a hand-written radiology report dated a week ago. There were significant findings, which the radiologist had correctly identified, but nobody had been notified, nor had the team had the organization to retrieve the report earlier.

I guess the secondary theme to this post, and another thing I never thought I'd be thankful for, is urgency. There is an utter lack of urgency in the hospital culture here, as the examples above illustrate. I'm a fairly laid-back person, but when it comes to a sick baby or child, I want things to happen quickly! It's easy to misinterpret the absence of urgency here as absence of caring about the children, but that's not the case -- everyone here clearly cares about giving these children good care, but in Namibia that caring is just not tied to anyone doing anything in a rush. As they say, this is Africa -- TIA!

*Sodium 115, Potassium 1.5