Working towards Health Equity and Access in Rural Nepal
Posted in Social Justice and Health on Jun 7th, 2011
Posted by Duncan Maru Since starting services at the Sanfe Clinic, Nyaya Health has been planning for the ultimate day when we would start surgical services. Now, nearly two years into services at Bayalpata Hospital, we are making preparations to take that next step. Concurrently, Nyaya Health has been developing the basic infrastructure necessary to [...]
Posted in Logistics and Management on May 31st, 2011
Posted by Duncan Maru Access to organizational documents are a key aspect of transparency. Overall, Nyaya has done a solid job documenting what we do so that our staff, leadership team, and volunteers are able to access the “institutional memory” needed to get work done. We’ve had a hodge-podge of a system in accomplishing this, [...]
Posted in Logistics and Management on May 25th, 2011
Posted by Duncan Maru “Duita bihana ma, Duita sanjh ko, la”. In counseling patients on how to take their medicines, the Bayalpata Hospital pharmacist Raviman Kunwar has the cadence of a Kathmandu micro-bus helper calling out to passengers to get on board, or an auctioneer selling his wares. At twenty-one years old, complete with stylish [...]
Posted in Logistics and Management, Social Justice and Health on May 22nd, 2011
Posted by Duncan Maru Much has been written and talked about with regards to the need for organizations, corporations, and governments to operate more transparently. The non-profit sector is particularly problematic, as the Global Accountability Report has made clear. Nyaya Health for our part has long held an organizational mandate of transparent operations. Operationalizing transparency [...]
Posted in Logistics and Management on May 5th, 2011
Posted by Duncan Maru Electricity is a central component to healthcare delivery, and where we work in Achham getting reliable energy is a challenge. I am hoping that this post will serve as a “before” snapshot at our energy system prior to the installation of our new solar system. We start at the single phase [...]
Posted in Logistics and Management on Apr 26th, 2011
Posted by Duncan Maru Data management is a core process of any healthcare operation. Nyaya Health has a central mission of using data to drive our services, evaluate our outcomes, and to disseminate our work to others. We have published papers and have extensive data uploaded to our wiki. Our data management program has a [...]
Posted in Social Justice and Health on Apr 13th, 2011
Posted by Duncan Maru Today, sitting outside the X-Ray department with Nyaya volunteer Gregory Karelas, I spent a little over an hour counting deaths. We went through the paper registries, including the 3,240 emergency and 1,259 inpatient registry entries. There have been 28 deaths since the start of Bayalpata Hospital’s operations 19 months ago. There [...]
Posted in Logistics and Management, Social Justice and Health on Apr 10th, 2011
Posted by Duncan Maru Since the initial days of Nyaya Health, we have struggled to identify a viable strategy for our community health worker program. Despite a strong vision that community health workers are critical to our work, the program hobbled along for our first two years of existence. During that time, we had four [...]
Posted in Logistics and Management, Social Justice and Health on Mar 16th, 2011
Posted by Duncan Maru Nyaya Health has long had a stated goal of developing “scaleable models”. This objective is both noble and alluring; wouldn’t it be great to work on something in one place that could solve problems in other similarly impoverished areas? The world, after all, has an overwhelming number of communities confronting similar issues of [...]
Posted in Patient Stories on Mar 3rd, 2011
Posted by Duncan Maru Note: The following post has graphic content The call came into Dilidai, our ambulance driver. A man from a village about six hours away had been bitten by a bear while collecting wood. Members of his village had carried down to Sanfebagar, where he was now awaiting the ambulance. His leg [...]
Posted in Patient Stories, Social Justice and Health on Feb 19th, 2011
Posted by Duncan Maru Note: Please be advised of potentially graphic medical content. The delivery room at Bayalpata Hospital was dimly lit. The walls, a pale yellow; the floor, the kind of brown cement that, though freshly cleaned by our health aide Chandrika didi, could never look clean. On the delivery table was a blue [...]
Posted in Patient Stories on Feb 14th, 2011
Posted by Duncan Maru Children, in their infinite capacity to explore the world, occasionally get small objects stuck in various orifices in their bodies. In Achham, such simple problems can lead to permanent morbidities such as deafness or even infection and death. At Bayalpata Hospital, extracting objects can be quite challenging. I spoke recently with [...]
Posted in Logistics and Management on Feb 7th, 2011
Posted by Duncan Maru There are two core experiences that define becoming a doctor in the modern medical education system: 1) taking part in our first year of medical school in the gross anatomy course, where we dissect the cadaver of some extremely generous and humble soul; 2) after medical school, during residency, of leading teams [...]
Posted in Logistics and Management on Jan 31st, 2011
Posted by Duncan Maru Each week, over the Nyaya Health team list, we send out an update from the happenings of Bayalpata Hospital. Our Executive Director Dan Schwarz gave me the distinct honor of producing the report this week. We do not often publish our weekly updates on the blog, but we like to occasionally [...]
Posted in News, Patient Stories on Jan 24th, 2011
Posted by Duncan Maru A brave little four-year-old girl with a pink hairband twisted on the crown of her head, pink and purple polka-dotted shirt, and purple socks is sitting in the procedure room. She had fallen earlier that day while playing and hurt her right arm. She has a small abrasion over her cheek [...]