I am absolutely blaming Douglas Alpenstock for this.
Douglas Alpenstock wrote:May I suggest that you start a new thread talking about your work?
I work on a ship. This ship spends around 10 months every year moored up in an African port. Onboard the ship are 300-400 people, around 1/3 - 1/2 are medical. We provide free surgery to people who can't access it elsewhere.
We have several focus areas. I'll let you look up the problems with cleft palate, VVF, noma, club foot, infant cataracts, aminotic bands, inguinal hernia, burn contractures, goiters and a few others.
I would guess that around 1/3 of what we see could be prevented through permaculture, 1/3 through the intervention of primary care and 1/3 that would require surgery in any context.
Personally, I'm the audio visual technician. I describe my job as preventing the ship turning into the MASH sitcom. I keep the conference rooms working, a couple of safety camera systems, the satellite TV system and train people on using the equipment. I also help out with the rest of the IT team as required (usually network or server related).
I've lived onboard for nearly 2 years now and I know we have problems. All of our electricity comes from diesel generators, we cool the ship with air conditioning and then use tumble dryers to dry our clothes and we ship most of our materials across the atlantic.
I see the ship as the poster child for our Medical Capacity Building program. I think at last count we had 27 courses running. This is where we help African countries see that they can run their own healthcare systems.
For example, the safer surgery course. This about using exotic materials or equipment but implementing things like the WHO's Surgical Safety checklist, which has been shown to reduce complications and improve outcomes.
Please ask questions, there's a lot of things I want to say but dumping it all on you in one go might not be helpful.
My political and religious beliefs are a large part of why I'm doing this and so I might fork this part off to a thread in the cider press.
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