Always Learning

I love learning new things. I love new experiences. Maybe that’s why I love being a doctor because one is always learning.  No two patients are ever the same.  Science progresses and we learn new techniques for treating patients, new ways of making surgery safer. Sometimes these things are not huge technological advances but simple things such as using a Checklist to make surgery safer.

At the end of April I spent a week driving through the interior of Guinea visiting 3 different hospitals. (Click on the Page tabs above to view some pictures of the Hospitals and the scenery). I learnt a lot. Each hospital was a 2 day journey along difficult potholed roads, or dirt roads with huge craters. We were fortunate it was the end of dry season. In rainy season some of the roads become impassable, and when the large pothols are full of mud and water it is easy to become stuck! Even in a landrover. Back in November when another Mercy Ships team went this way in two landrovers, one of the landrovers actually became stuck. Thankfully the other one had a winch so could rescue the first vehicle. Driving here is not for the faint-hearted. But when you learn how to drive these roads it is actually quite fun. Oscar, our Hospital Projects Manager had spent two years living in Liberia so he knew these road conditions well. I learnt a lot by watching him.

The aim of our trip was to visit Kissidougou, Kankan and Labe hospitals to follow-up on the training we had given to Obstetric Fistula Surgeons and in two cases their anesthetists and nursing staff as well. We were not so much interested in what particular surgical techniques they had learnt but rather what principles of safe surgery (such as the Safe Surgery Checklist), whole person care and empathy they had learnt through our methods of modelling and discussing these concepts. I was humbled and amazed how much they had learnt and how diligent they had been trying to put it into practice various actions and attitudes. The culture here is described as an ‘honour / shame culture’.  So I knew our visit to their hospitals would honour them. Back home visitors to a hospital can be viewed as a burden - a ‘oh gosh who is going to look after them’ type-attitude. Not in West Africa. Visiting the surgeons honoured them to their Hospital Director, and honoured them in their community and family. But I also learnt that driving two days to visit them showed we cared. It added credibility to our training program. The training program aims to model ‘whole person care’, ‘servant-hearted leadership’ and  to instil ‘individual value and worth even for those with disfigurement or disability’. I learnt that we can model these concepts not simply by the way we treat patients and each other our ship hospital, but also by visiting the trainees in their own environment. These follow-up visits showed we don’t just teach healthcare professionals, we also care about them as individuals.

Medicine treats and cares, Education teaches and cares.

I still have much to learn about teaching medical knowledge, skills and attitudes cross-culturally in West Africa but I learnt an important lesson this week and I am very thankful.

I love the fact that life is one long learning process. It keeps me humble