Greetings from Darbhanga! We've been having some internet difficulties the past few days, but now we're plugged back in... After an overnight train ride from Kolkata to Patna, a brief Jhpiego office visit, and a 5 hour drive, we made it to Darbhanga last night. The city of Darbhanga is the capital of the Darbhanga district of Bihar with nearly 4 million inhabitants of which over 90% live in rural areas. It's been an adventure getting here and it seems the adventure will continue as we venture from our hotel within a fort (yes, the hotel is within the walls of a fort) out on the bumpy roads shared with all sorts of livestock to the villages for visits with various health care workers. We'll definitely update more on our visits in Bihar and last few days in Kolkata, but for now I'm going to jump back a week to our day in New Dehli at the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) visiting with the guys from Stanford India Biodesign (SIB).
The SIB center is located on the first floor of the Old OT Block at AIIMS, so after a bit of a sweaty walk from our hotel to AIIMS we sat down with the SIB fellows to get an overview of the Stanford Biodesign program and their experience in visits to lower level health care facilities out in the periphery earlier this year. CBID and SIB are basically kin in the sense that both programs are focused on medical technology innovation through direct experience and a needs based approach, so their overview of the Indian health care system and their needs filtering process gave us a solid frame of reference to start with. The SIB center is located at AIIMS to give the fellows direct access to clinicians, wards and operating rooms for observation in a very similar manner to the clinical rotations us CBIDers had been immersed in at JHMI this summer. After our overview and a southern Indian lunch, the SIB fellows split us up along with another batch of visiting Stanford Biodesign fellows for a walk through of the institute. AIIMS was established back in the 1950s to serve as a center of excellence for health care and medical education. Today AIIMS is consistently ranked as the top medical college in India and manages to serve over 3 million patients a year, many of which are too poor to afford medical treatment elsewhere. Even through our visit was in the afternoon with supposedly only a fraction of the daily patient load still around, I was most struck by the shear number of people crowding the wards and halls. The daily patient load is metered by tokens distributed to patients each morning (many of whom start lining up at morning hours I still consider night time), but the numbers that are seen each day is remarkable even though a supervising nurse that was kind enough to speak with me cited patient load as the biggest challenge they face at AIIMS. Unfortunately we were not able to visit the actual wards and OTs (operating theater = operating room), but we definitely left with a better understanding of medical care at apex facilities in India and a solid set of contacts with SIB and other Stanford Biodesign fellows that I hope will lead to some kind of collaboration in the future.
We'll be back with more post on our time in Kolkata and Bihar, but here are a couple of pictures from our visits today with Agunwadis, ASHAs and ANMs... (please excuse the alphabet soup, we'll be sure to explain)
-Michelle
The SIB center is located on the first floor of the Old OT Block at AIIMS, so after a bit of a sweaty walk from our hotel to AIIMS we sat down with the SIB fellows to get an overview of the Stanford Biodesign program and their experience in visits to lower level health care facilities out in the periphery earlier this year. CBID and SIB are basically kin in the sense that both programs are focused on medical technology innovation through direct experience and a needs based approach, so their overview of the Indian health care system and their needs filtering process gave us a solid frame of reference to start with. The SIB center is located at AIIMS to give the fellows direct access to clinicians, wards and operating rooms for observation in a very similar manner to the clinical rotations us CBIDers had been immersed in at JHMI this summer. After our overview and a southern Indian lunch, the SIB fellows split us up along with another batch of visiting Stanford Biodesign fellows for a walk through of the institute. AIIMS was established back in the 1950s to serve as a center of excellence for health care and medical education. Today AIIMS is consistently ranked as the top medical college in India and manages to serve over 3 million patients a year, many of which are too poor to afford medical treatment elsewhere. Even through our visit was in the afternoon with supposedly only a fraction of the daily patient load still around, I was most struck by the shear number of people crowding the wards and halls. The daily patient load is metered by tokens distributed to patients each morning (many of whom start lining up at morning hours I still consider night time), but the numbers that are seen each day is remarkable even though a supervising nurse that was kind enough to speak with me cited patient load as the biggest challenge they face at AIIMS. Unfortunately we were not able to visit the actual wards and OTs (operating theater = operating room), but we definitely left with a better understanding of medical care at apex facilities in India and a solid set of contacts with SIB and other Stanford Biodesign fellows that I hope will lead to some kind of collaboration in the future.We'll be back with more post on our time in Kolkata and Bihar, but here are a couple of pictures from our visits today with Agunwadis, ASHAs and ANMs... (please excuse the alphabet soup, we'll be sure to explain)
-Michelle
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