First impressions..

Firstly, thanks for reading our blog. If you're a friend or family, welcome. If you're a medical student hoping to find some information about doing a placement at Mnazi Mmoja, hopefully you find this blog useful.
We're three med students from Melbourne who are doing a six week placement at the major hospital on the island of Zanzibar, off the coast of Tanzania. Two of us are deferred for the year, and the other is doing it as his uni elective for final year.. we've now been in Zanzibar just about a week, so we thought we'd start a blog to put some information out, and also keep anyone else at least mildly informed as to what we're doing over here.

We'll probably blog a bit sporadically whilst we're over here, if anything particularly worthy happens we'll try to write about it. Also hopefully get up a few photos. And also, cause we found there wasn't too much info around when we were planning this ourselves, to try and help out anyone who is considering coming here in the future.. 

The three of us are divided over the departments of paeds, surgery and internal medicine, and we're planning to swap around over the placement and get a feel for each over the 6 weeks. In the meantime, living in Stone Town and exploring the areas around the island will keep us pretty busy. It's an extremely vibrant place to live.

First impressions are that this hospital is a pretty interesting place. The medicine is very different to anything we've experienced before.

The internal med department has two wards, one for 'infectious' cases and the other for everything else, which encompasses a fair bit of cardio and resp illnesses, diabetes, musculoskeletal, and everything else.. the infectious ward is a bit smaller and there is a lot of HIV pts, malaria, TB etc. There are not too many doctors around the hospital, but there are heaps of nurses. The patients speak pretty much zero English, and the doctors have varying abilities of English. Hence, translating information is a bit of an issue. That said, all the hospital notes are written in English, so at least we can read them, and gain what info we can from that and the doctors' efforts to translate to us. There is what you would call a scarcity of resources..when the doctor decides the patient would benefit from a drug, they write the name on a scrap of paper, and then a family member of the pt will run into town to find a pharmacy that stocks it.. there is one CT scanner in the hospital, which seems to get used quite a lot, and there are ECG and XR facilities available, so that's good. Blood tests are done regularly and there is a lab on site, but it can take a little while to get the results..Apart from that, there is very little in the way of electronic or other tools, so it is largely down to history and examination - and clinical decisions and plans are based on a most likely diagnoses.