The entire team spent the day at Hospital No. 1. We were greeted by the Director, Dr. Sonin Sodov. He gave us an overview of the hospital history as well as some background information regarding medical availability in Mongolia. Hospital No. 1 opened in 1925. It is the largest hospital in Mongolia. There are 21 provinces and each has a general hospital with about 200 beds. The villages have hospitals with 10-15 beds. According to Dr. Sodov there is a great shortage of doctors in rural areas but a surplus in the capital, Ulaanbaatar. There is also a shortage of nurses so the doctors often do nurse's work. He was very kind and expressed gratitude for IVUmed's visit and acknowledged the power of volunteerism.
Drs. DeVries, Hamilton and Reddy performed a total of seven surgeries today. The sanitation conditions are very different from those in the US. For example, there are many items used during surgery that are thrown out in the US but reused in Mongolia. The autoclave machine was an antique according to one of the nurses. It was covered with rust and had an open lid. It was more like a bubbling pot than an autoclave.
Patients in Mongolia are responsible for carrying their records with them. I even witnessed a patient holding onto a disposibile camera on her way into surgery, perhaps with the hope that anything that needed to be in her record would be photographed. The families take a lot of responsibility for the patient's care and nutrition. I guess they can't complain about hospital food with that being the case!
Tomorrow we will split up in to two teams: one will go to Hospital No. 1, the other to the pediatric hospital. There is an ambitious case load and it seems the local doctors would like to add even more. IVUmed is so highly regarded here that the local physicians really want to maximize our staff's time. Although our hectic schedule doesn't leave much time for rest it is invigorating to think of the positive results the IVUmed team is accomplishing.
Ellen Thorp, Trip Secretary
~Mongolia2008
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