Child Health Week - Day 2

Today we started with the drive to Green Leaf to pick up the vaccines then back to the health centre to load up the rest of the supplies and Nurse Ednah before heading to the Sungula Zone for the day. This is located North of the school itself and along narrow dirt tracks - I never realised that there was such a network of tracks which are fairly navigable with a vehicle once you leave the main gravel road ! Again only about a 7km trip each way so not a bad jaunt.


At Sungula they have built a small shelter (above) to serve as the health post so this is where we set up for the day (below) and dealt with 156 children.




The routine is that each child first gets checked in and weighed (done by the zone volunteers), then goes to a station to receive Vitamin A and de-worming pills (Salome and a volunteer), then to me (in this case) to record some information off their health card onto the data sheet and to record some information onto their health card about the treatment they have just had; and finally to Nurse Ednah for some more statistical information and any vaccinations if necessary.

The health centre had only been given a few of the printed forms necessary for the data collection so prior to the session today we had to take time to make up our own forms using a ruler and pen to draw the lines on blank pages. As the day wore on we had to stop to make more sheets to accommodate the numbers that had shown up. When I got back to base this evening I formatted the form in Excel and now have a file to print the necessary forms for each day. Such a simple thing for us but they just don't have the resources to do that sort of thing here on the ground. We could serve the community so well by being able to provide such a typing and printing service as anything they need done either gets done by hand or they have to take to Kapiri/Kabwe and pay for it to be done.