Day 4 - Hospital Visit

Now that we had plenty of food and had unpacked, it was time to find out more about the work we would be doing while in Kudjip.

So Friday morning we met with Ben Radcliffe, who is the COO and Director of Medical Services for Nazarene General Hospital. He is also the Chief of Surgery. Ben gave us a tour of the hospital which was founded by the Church of the Nazarene in 1967. It has five wards containing 134 beds - pediatric, surgical, medical, obstetric and tuberculosis. Yes, you read that right … tuberculosis. It’s one of the leading causes of death in PNG and it’s rampant in this area. We did not visit this ward. 

There are around 10 doctors and 60 nurses that serve a population of around half a million people. And, because there is so little medical care available, the patients that come here, many from very remote mountainous areas, are very, very sick. 

To make a comparison. Lynchburg VA has a surrounding area population of around 250,000 and has nearly 400 primary care doctors. 

To really give you an idea of what this looks like. Here is a day in a life of a doctor here. This is Jake Morris, who I wrote about before. Genae’s brother @evanlanier made this video when he visited them last year.

Later in the month, I spent a morning shadowing several doctors in the hospital. We did rounds on the medical ward, were in the ER, and also the clinic. 

I have spent very little time in hospitals, so all of it was rather new to me. But in the three hours I was there, I saw 15 patients. They were there for a variety of ailments, from unexplained abdominal pains to broken bones, to machete chops, to sepsis, tuberculosis, meningitis and heart failure. So many of them were very sick. When the doctors can’t offer them anything else medicine or procedure-wise, they offer to pray with them. In only three hours, we did that four times. One of them was a child. My heart was breaking. 

But the most common patient I saw that morning was not from severe sickness, but were women who had been beaten by their husbands. One of them was 35 weeks pregnant. Another had been found in a ditch and would need surgery. I had some very un-Christian thoughts, and it was a good thing their husbands were not there because I might have put my newly acquired black belt to good use. 

*Note: The views expressed in this video and my blog do not necessarily represent the views of Samaritan’s Purse or Kudjip Nazarene Hospital.

But also of note: The video above of Jake Morris was made before a big change was coming to the hospital, an electronic medical record (EMR) system Tom will be helping out with. After our first tour of the hospital, Tom would be meeting the team working on that and come up with a plan to help over the next month. He will give more details in a separate blog entry soon.