Surveying in Montoya
Our truck! Able to cross rivers and carry 15 people!
Rachel and Josie conducting a survey
The new hospital being built just outside the center of town
This is where we slept for three weeks in El Sauce
El Sauce on a clear morning
Piloting the survey in the Centro de Salud, El Sauce
It's really interesting to hear about these challenges. It sounds like the community you are working in has a lot of competing priorities. I wonder where you see the work you are doing fitting into the larger scheme of more immediate problems (like vector control, for instance).
ReplyDeleteThanks for your comment Micah. You're right that the community has a lot of competing priorities. For example, they are maintaining a program of 'brigadistas' which is focused on local (i.e. village-specific) health improvement, with infants and mothers as its target population. At the same time they are collecting quite a bit of health data already and have plans to start a comprehensive injury database. The UNAN medical students spent a lot of their time entering data. They have a new hospital to populate and run, outreach programs to prevent STIs and HIV, and a vaccine initiative to ensure that every single child in El Sauce receives all the required vaccines. This is all in addition to the vector control program they are running, to prevent vector-borne diseases such as dengue, malaria, and, most recently, leptospirosis. As far as I can tell, they have hired employees assigned to each of the task areas I have listed, but interestingly there were three vector control workers available to us almost every day - on a couple days we only had two. Therefore, although originally it seemed our group's survey work might be a burden on the vector control group, in the end it turned out that they had the manpower to spare and things worked out quite well. By virtue of visiting the surrounding villages often, the vector control workers have a wealth of knowledge about these communities, not only about the topography and quantity of houses, but also about health issues specific to each village. And it seems that when they are not following an outbreak or fumigating an area, as a group they may have time to dedicate to following up on some of the issues our data reveal. I’m sure it’s not that simple, but I think the El Sauce staff welcomed our efforts and a strengthened partnership with UNAN, and I think there is room for further collaboration as long as we include El Sauce health department staff in the planning process.
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