Changes Here

Hey All I know I have not posted for a bit here but the end of August the first three weeks of September were quite a time of change here. The work that I originally came here to do - working with nurses at St Mary's hospital, developing systems and policy for the hospital and providing HR leadership and management kind has come to a close. The hospital and its supporting body - the Coptic Mission due to lack of funds, leadership and ability to retain physicians has been temporarily suspended here in Ethiopia.  At first I was very disappointed at perhaps it seems like everything Nicole and I had worked for the past 5 months had been in vain.... yes there was a lot of good- 20 AV fistula formations, a bunch of successful surgeries, the linkage of a few of the Hope for Korah beneficiaries to acute care services and specialists that they may not have seen previously but all of our other work... where was it supposed to endup.  But then we realized through meeting with other contacts as well as the health ministry that all that we had learned and the multitude of documents and systems we had worked on creating were unique here in Ethiopia.  The government hospitals especially, have on paper, very high standards they are to meet as well as a vision of how they should provide services but the professionals here themselves lack experience with the practical application of these guidelines and standards.  So Nicole and I have been working 4-5 days a week with nursing and hospital leadership at several government hospitals with leaders who are a passionate about wanting change and quality care in their facilities.  We have been working with them on a multitude of things -document creations, developing policy and protocol, educations strategies for their nurses as well as hospital wide things such as mass disaster planning.  All of this not possible unless we had spent the last 5 months integrating World Health Regulations, Ethiopian Standards and well established Canadian standards into workable solutions within the healthcare/resource setting. So not what I set out here to do but interesting exciting work non the less. 

You may notice the lack of photos... my phone unfortunately was stolen two weeks ago - on it all my photos from Ethiopian New Years, the time I learned to pluck a chicken and more. .... but that is life... Aside from work life here is going good.. spending time with friends- expat and local alike on the weekends starting to look forward to the team from Abbotsford joining us shortly