How things work

Okey dokey readers! The time has come for me to tell you how health care works in Uganda. The International Hospital in Kampala is probably the best equipped and best staffed hospital in Uganda. It is for foreigners or Ugandans who have health insurance or lots of money. I know that Ugandans With Lots of Money exist. I see them when I walk by the big golf course on my way to the grocery store. Then I try to do the math to figure out........if the median annual income for the whole country is $490......





Other than the golf course, Kampala has its own "mega mall" called Garden City.









The rest of Kampala looks decidedly more Third World.









I am told that people who work for the government or who work for one of the large companies here (telecom, mining, etc.) receive health insurance benefits. Supposedly, Mulago Hospital is the next best equipped and best staffed hospital in the country. It is for people who have no money and no insurance. Some people with money and insurance go there to a "private wing" that I haven't been allowed to see but that I hear isn't that much better than the public part of the hospital. I did go to a regular patient ward today to perform a needle aspiration biopsy of a female patient's enlarged lymph node. I wanted to take a picture of it for you but my Internal Ethical Compass wouldn't let me take my camera out of my bag. Please allow me to use words....... Words like "horror movie" and "third circle of hell" are what immediately come to mind. Dr. Helen Towers (the visiting neonatologist from Columbia University) describes the Maternity Ward and the Newborn Unit in similar terms. Interestingly, Dr. Towers is here with a Columbia Professor of Bioengineering (Dr. Aaron Kyle) and his graduate student (Gary Zhang) delivering new "smaller-cheaper-more reliable" devices for newborn care that they have developed in their laboratory. Dr. Towers visited the Missionary Hospital in rural Eastern Uganda yesterday, ostensibly to deliver a device that her team had developed for Newborn Transport. She said that the Mission Hospital, which is owned and operated by the Catholic Church and run by an Irish Catholic physician, was so clean, orderly and well run that she couldn't imagine why they would want to transfer a baby from there to Mulago Hospital in Kampala. Dr. Towers' theory? It's all about administration.








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Location:Mulago Hospital, Kampala, Uganda