Project Update

Hello,

I apologize for getting behind on my blogs. The past few weeks have been busy with wrapping things up on my project and then traveling around Laos. My interpreter Philavanh and I finished interviewing the control group of 100 parents at Mother & Child Health Hospital. Just to remind you the control group is made up of parents of children aged 6 to 18 months who did not receive any newborn care education. I’m still working on the data analysis but from just an initial comparison it looks like the intervention group is more likely to own a thermometer and know how to use it, and is also more confident about their knowledge of neonatal illness.

We also finally received the participant gifts that I had ordered after they returned from their detour to another city. The gifts are children’s t-shirts with the UCSF Children’s Hospital and Mother & Child Health Hospital logos on the back. Here’s a picture of the shirts and of our first t-shirt recipient:

I’ve also been spending some time on the neonatology ward at MCHH and taking call with a couple of the attendings. The patient load can vary from zero to completely full (10 infants) from day to day. The ward was renovated recently thanks to a grant from the Swiss-Lao Hospital Project. They also have two CPAP (continuous positive airway pressure) machines that were donated by an NGO from Vietnam. They also have a lot of monitoring equipment that has been donated by UCSF and the Swiss-Lao Project. But they do not have a working ventilator and this prevents them from being able to treat many pre-term infants with respiratory distress effectively. Here are some pictures of the neonatology ward:

I’ll write some more about the hospital next time as well as my homestay in a Lao village.

Ammu

The Library at MCHH

Also, here are some pictures of the library at Mother & Child Health Hospital. This room used to be an unused conference room, but my research mentor at MCHH, Dr. Somxay, had the idea for creating a library that could be used by the staff and medical students. With the help of some funding from my UCSF research mentors, Dr. Colin Partridge & Dr. Alma Martinez, they were able to create this library, which is used by all the medical students (and by me for my patient interviews). Many of the books were donated by the Swiss-Laos Hospital Project and by a Korean physician, Dr. Park, who is a volunteer here. There is a computer with an internet connection for staff to look up online references as well.

Project Update

Hello,

I apologize for the long delay in posting to the blog. It’s been really busy here these past two weeks. After the Lao New Year was over, we had a flood of women come into the hospital for follow-up appointments. As I mentioned previously, the first part of my project involves following up with all of the women who received newborn care education last spring and re-testing them to see if they were able to retain the information that they learned. Last year, another UCSF med student – Liz Weiner – tested 101 women in the prenatal clinic at Mother & Child Health Hospital before and after they received the newborn care teaching. So now, I’ve been following up with as many of the women as possible, with the help of two amazing translators – Philavahn and Chittaphone, who are both residents at the hospital.

We had a list of cell phone numbers for 94 of the women from the original group. Since it is very common for people to change their phone numbers here in Laos, I estimated that we’d be able to get in touch with about 1/3 of them. But after about 10 days of very persistent phone calls, we managed to interview 55 of the women (almost 60%)! About half were interviewed over the phone and the other half actually came into the hospital for in-person interviews. Most of the women who came into the hospital brought their children with them, so I got to entertain them with my UCSF ID badge while their mothers talked with Chittaphone & Philavahn.

On Monday of this week we finished up the last of the 55 follow-up interviews. The rest of the phone numbers were either out of service or were wrong numbers. So on Tuesday we started recruiting the control group, which will be composed of parents of children 6 to 18 months old who did not receive any prenatal newborn care teaching. We’ve been recruiting from the vaccination clinic & the out-patient department and so far we have about 25 participants.

In the mean time, there was a slight delay in getting the gifts for the participants ready. One of my research mentors’ sisters was supposed to order t-shirts for the kids that would have the logos of UCSF Children’s Hospital and MCHH on them. She ordered the shirts in Thailand when she went there for Lao New Year. Unfortunately, the shirts got shipped to the wrong address in Laos, so they still haven’t gotten screened with the logos. But we are hoping that they’ll be ready by next week.

So for now, we will keep interviewing women for the control group. And next week there is a chance that I might be able to go and visit a rural hospital in the northeastern part of Laos. A small contingent of doctors and nurses from MCHH will be traveling to this provincial hospital to provide training to the staff there. The hospitals in Vientiane are much better equipped than those in the other provinces, so it would be a good opportunity to see what kind of health services people in other parts of the country have access to. If I am able to go, I will post more about it.

Ammu

Sabaidee!

Hello,

Welcome to the blog for my research project in Laos for UCSF's Global Health Sciences Master's program. I arrived in Vientiane, the capital city of Laos, last week and have just gotten started on my project.

The goal of my project is to study the effects of neonatal care education for expectant mothers. We're focusing on the basics like umbilical cord care, temperature control, and recognizing signs of illness (especially sepsis) in neonates. Laos currently has a very high infant mortality rate and infections are the leading cause of death for infants in the first month of life. So we're hoping to show that providing mothers with basic education about caring for their infants can be both effective & sustainable.

What I'll be doing (or trying to do) is following up with women who received the newborn care teaching last year at a hospital in the capital city to see how effective it was. Then later on, I hope to travel to a rural hospital to see if the same education can be effective for women who have much lower levels of education and literacy. Along the way, I'll be exploring the beautiful country of Laos and working with the pediatric attendings and residents at the Mother & Child Health Hospital in Vientiane.

As I mentioned, I have just gotten started on the first part of the project, but this week is the Lao New Year, so everyone in Laos is on holiday, including all the doctors at the hospital. We'll be starting back up on Monday. So for now, I'm practicing my Lao and doing some prep work. Sabaidee pi mai lao! (Happy New Year!)

Ammu