Oct. 27, 2016
Over the course of two weeks this summer, three ASRT members worked with radiologic technologists at Kamuzu Central Hospital and 15 third-year radiography students at the Malawi College of Health Sciences to implement sustainable changes that will improve patient care in Lilongwe, Malawi.
“Our primary focus was on the students and on making ultrasonography a sustainable avenue for them,” said ASRT Foundation Community Outreach Fellow Thomas Wall, RDMS, RVT. “Radiography is the primary modality there, and even though there is not a formal sonography training program, they are expected to perform both modalities in the hospital.”
“We created a beginning ultrasound curriculum for the college to implement,” said Siemens ASRT Foundation Community Outreach Fellow Jason Lee, B.S., R.R.A., R.T.(R)(CT). “We provided lots of hands-on training at the hospital and in the classroom using the two labtop ultrasound machines Thomas brought,” Jason said.
“The hands-on training we did was supplemented by classroom lectures and PowerPoint presentations,” said ASRT Foundation Community Outreach Fellow Rick Moriss, R.T.(R)(CT), RDMS. “We left the presentations and lectures notes for the college to use as a resource in the future.”
“This work provided a great start to developing a sustainable ultrasonography program at the Malawi College of Health Sciences,” Thomas said. “But more follow-up education is needed to keep the program moving forward.”
The program has to be built slowly to ensure that everything that is implemented is supported and can continue after community outreach fellows return home, Jason said. “We laid the groundwork for this program, but future outreach efforts will be needed to move it forward. We got the students curious about learning ultrasonography, and now we need to help them continue to educate themselves,” he said.
Rick emphasized Jason’s point by saying that each step forward with the new program will need to be taken carefully to ensure that what is implemented can be sustained and that it will continue to teach people for years to come. “We can’t go in for two weeks and try to fix everything; it has to be baby steps taken over a long period of time in order to create lasting change to patient care in the area,” he said.
“Our secondary focus was improving the quality of ultrasounds being performed at Kamuzu Central Hospital,” said Thomas. “Every morning we worked at the hospital, scanning up to 15 patients each, teaching best practices to the students and technologists.
“All of the patients arrived for their examinations promptly at 8 every morning. They waited for hours at a time, sitting on old, hard, wooden benches, or simply standing in line,” Jason said. “I admired how these patients showed up for the examinations. The entire time we were there, I never heard a patient complain about the wait. They were excited to have a scheduled appointment and dedicated patient care. It was truly amazing.”
The region is extremely poverty stricken, which means that the people who live there can’t afford to have routine medical care. They only come in when their illness or injury renders them unable to work or to continue their daily lives. This leads to some rare pathologies, the likes of which these outreach fellows had never seen before in their careers.
Rick remembers one patient in particular that stood out. “A little boy, roughly six years old, came in with his grandfather. He weighed maybe 60 pounds and had a rock-hard, cannon-ball-size mass on his hip that caused him to walk with a significant limp,” Rick said. “I completed his scan to track the progress of the mass’ growth and then called for a wheelchair to help him exit the hospital, as I knew he had walked all the way there from somewhere in town.”
The wheelchair arrived, but its front wheels didn’t work well, and the foot pedals were missing. A makeshift footrest had been created from string and gauze. “It was hard for me to watch him leave, knowing that there was little that could be done for him with the current treatments and procedures available in Malawi,” Rick said.
While two weeks wasn’t long enough to elevate patient care in Malawi to what it is here in the United States, Jason knows they had had a great impact on the technologists and students they worked with. “Before we left, several of them were asking questions about how to perform examinations differently while tailoring it to the patient’s anatomy,” he said. “The technologists and students I worked with still contact me with questions, and I’m thrilled to be able to continue to be a resource for them,” he said.
“Everyone we worked with was engaged and eager to learn as much from us as they could,” Thomas added. The technologists and students have stayed in contact with all three since their return home. “It was important to me that we didn’t just go in and try to teach them as much as we could in two weeks and then leave them on their own,” he said. “We need to continue to be a resource for them to advance not only their careers, but also the profession and health care as a whole in Malawi.”
Jason, Rick and Thomas all saw firsthand the great things that ASRT Foundation donors are making possible with their support of community outreach efforts. They also know that to make a lasting difference in underserved regions like Malawi, ongoing community outreach efforts are needed. The continued support of Foundation donors is essential to keep advancing the profession around the world and improving patient care.
Will you be a part of strengthening the profession and creating sustainable change by making a gift to the Foundation today?
Photo, from left: Jason Lee, B.S., R.R.A., R.T.(R)(CT); Thomas Wall, RDMS, RVT; and Rick Moriss, R.T.(R)(CT), RDMS.