The members of Switch India celebrated this Maharashtra day a bit differently. Physicians, Physiotherapists, Dentists and medical students from Kolhapur, Pune and Mumbai gathered in the city of Badlapur in the ignored outskirts of Mumbai. The location of this camp was slightly closer to the railway station than the previous one, giving people from nearby localities a better reach for our camp.
For the first time, we collaborated with the Nagarparishad of Kulgaon-Badlapur region. This association gave us skilled doctors and public health educators which raised the level of expertise in our camp up a notch.
A hall was rented nearby which provided a stage for the government formalities to take place simultaneously as the camp commenced. The hall with the stage formed a kind of waiting room for the patients while the back of the hall was closed off for the area of examination.
The patients turned up 11 am and after slight delay we sailed smoothly. A record of the name, address and age at the registration table, BP and weight was taken before dispersing the patients to the scrutiny of 8 medical students for general examination.
The medical students of final year MBBS, well versed with basic diagnostic skills, made judgments on whether an expert opinion was required and referred the patients to either a General Physician, Dentist, Orthopaedic or Physiotherapist. Having experienced a great burden of Gynaecological problems in our last camp we made it a point to get in a Gynaecologist.
Having Physiotherapy one of the focuses of our camp gives us an edge over the other camps that majorly use mere painkillers for the highly common complaint of pain. Many of the patients who came had been introduced to physiotherapy for the first time and absolutely loved the idea of exercise over medicines.
We have been extremely lucky to have dedicated doctors and dentists taking time out of their busy schedules and selflessly providing accurate care to all those they examined, without any referrals to their own hospitals which becomes a common problem in many camps.
After being thoroughly checked, we also provided free medicines at our Pharmacy table which was manned by the Government public health employees and 2 of our own medical students. The patients received a range of basic medicines absolutely free of cost thanks to our sponsors. Multivitamins were given to almost every patient considering the state of their health.
In spite of the heavy load, kudos to the General examination and Pharmacy table for doing their job diligently with equal amount of attention given to every patient.
The Government provided us with an interesting table on Malaria with health educators. The props of Gambusia fishes and mosquito larvae made it a source of attraction and information for not only the patients but also the medical students and were thereby a huge success!
After having learnt our lesson from running around trying to educate them in what we thought was important in the last camp, we found that patients are interested in knowing about the diseases that they are suffering from and many a times due to the heavy load, a doctor is unable to explain properly their condition to them. To catch their attention, we realized we must talk to them about something that concerns them.
So this time, we simply set up a counselling table with 4 of our own medical and physiotherapy students for the patients to chat with. Even though we did miss quite a few patients who left directly after collecting their medicines, we did get to chat up with a majority of them.
We sat them down, informed them of their condition, the type and action of the medicines they were about to take, prognosis of their disease and any lifestyle changes they must carry about. This was an extremely informative activity for both the patients and the students. It helped clear a lot of doubts in the patients’ minds leaving them with a little bit more than just medicines.
At the end of the day we had registered and hopefully provided good care to around 200 patients! But though we had proximity to the station, for some reason, not many from the very poor classes showed up as compared to our previous camps. Maybe it was a flaw with inadequate advertising or maybe the location was a little fancy for them.
All in all, we’ve had a fantastic experience with much better care than our previous camps and we can definitely say we are marching on the road to improvement. We shall definitely keep going and keep growing.
