This morning we received our first donation 💰and we have already advanced significantly 🌪️
Let us begin with some BEFORE photos...
Site of new triage bay (from front door)
This sign on the broken door is the only indication that a patient is entering Casualty! So many urgently ill patients miss the sign and walk around aimlessly looking for the entrance. We also get a lot of people walking directly into the room asking us for directions to some other place whilst we are resuscitating a patient 🤦♀️….we REALLY need a proper sign…
Site of new triage bay (from red zone entrance)
The front door cannot close (only one door remains of a double door, and so there is no protection from weather. More importantly health workers and patients have no protection against violent, psychotic or inebriated patients/public
View into the red zone from where the new triage bay will be placed
No triage patients just walk in and take a seat or enter the space where we are treating critical patients. They queue and watch the sick patients in their beds without curtains and we have no idea who is more critically ill. Hence the need to make a triage desk and implement a triage workflow in this unused atrium.
The red zone
The curtains. There were actually no curtains before this week, I just put them up urgently to ensure basic dignity. Many urgent cases require catheterisation, rape victims need vaginal exams: deeply intimate procedures that should have complete privacy.
The red zone
Destroyed roofing and floors the roof leaks directly on to our patients in their beds. To fix this it would cost CHF5’000. The flooring is at a similar price. This is currently out of our budget. 😢
The consultation room
The lack of storage the lack of storage space is a direct threat to urgent care.
Broken chairs are dangerous for elderly and unstable patients
No pediatric facilities (like as in zero...no saturation monitor no bed. Nothing)
Ok...enough complaining...within minutes of getting our first donation, we got to work….
The CEO of the hospital (Myriam), spent the entire day here with her child-minder’s son (name=Excellent), volunteering their time to clean and prepare the walls for painting and plastering.
When we started washing the vinyl on the wall, it started disintegrating.
We needed to remove it, but it left large holes and stubborn glue on the walls, so the only solution was plastering.
I’m very happy to have discovered Jeff whose informal company is called Yankie KaJeff Enterprise. He will be doing our Rhino-Liting (a South-Africanism for plastering) for just R1000.00!
The walls are now stripped and cleaned-- plastering/painting starts at 08h00 tomorrow!
Thank-you to Excellent and Myriam for their energetic assistance today.
Thank-you to Build It hoedspruit and Raja Hardware for giving us significant discounts on the building materials.