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
