Working towards Health Equity and Access in Rural Nepal
Posted in News, Social Justice and Health on Dec 29th, 2011
Dear members of the Nyaya Health family, I am writing you today to tell you why we must forever change the way infectious diseases are diagnosed and treated in Far-Western Nepal through a new partnership with One Day’s Wages. That “why” for me was found in Maya, a patient at Bayalpata Hospital last October. Maya was like many [...]
Posted in Patient Stories, Social Justice and Health on Dec 27th, 2011
Posted by Duncan Maru A baby boy died at 36 hours of life. I had first heard about him back at the staff quarters at around midnight, when a seven month pregnant woman had just given birth in the bathroom. He was small, 1.5 kg. His heart rate was very slow, and we started bag-mask [...]
Posted in Mortality Reviews, News, Social Justice and Health on Oct 1st, 2011
Posted by Ryan Schwarz Over the last two years Nyaya has spearheaded a Morbidity and Mortality Conference (M&M), which aims to provide a venue for Bayalpata Hospital’s clinical staff to critically reflect on and evaluate serious illnesses and deaths that occur. The effort is aimed at improving the quality of the care we offer, particularly [...]
Posted in News on Aug 15th, 2011
Nyaya’s Co-Founder, Dr. Sanjay Basu recently published an article in the New York Times on the health needs of illegal immigrants in San Francisco, USA. Undocumented immigrant workers in the USA frequently have greatly limited access to healthcare services, similar to patients we serve in Achham, and people in other impoverished communities throughout the world. Nyaya believes [...]
Posted in Patient Stories, Social Justice and Health on Jul 4th, 2011
Posted by Micheal Polifka This post was written by Dr. Michael Polifka, Nyaya team volunteer, as a personal journal entry during a recent trip to Bayalpata Hospital in Achham, Nepal. The varying amounts of moisture in the air (from a lot to more) coupled with the winds that circulate around the hilltops makes for constantly [...]
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 Social Justice and Health on Mar 30th, 2011
Posted by Dr. Arunima Rajbhandry Bayalpata Hospital outpatient department was crowded with patients, all lined up eagerly to be seen by a clinician. I was done seeing my first few and rang the bell to call for the next patient. A thin, nervous looking middle-aged woman walked in, along with her teenage daughter. “I have [...]
Posted in News, Social Justice and Health on Dec 1st, 2010
Posted by Jason Andrews The staff of Bayalpata Hospital and our community, led by Dr. Amir Bista and Megha Giri, celebrated World AIDS Day with a host of festivities. This included a dramatic enactment of the pathogenesis of HIV infection in which staff acted as the host, virus, CD4 count and opportunistic infection, as well [...]
Posted in Mortality Reviews, Patient Stories on Aug 22nd, 2010
Posted by Duncan Maru, MD, PHD We are unlikely to find the ultimate cause of death for two young male siblings who died at Bayalpata Hospital after a toxin ingestion. In our mortality review, the key point of reflection is less on our clinical operations, as they have been recently, and more on the general [...]
Posted in Patient Stories, Social Justice and Health on Aug 9th, 2010
Posted by Duncan Maru, MD, PHD At Bayalpata Hospital, we face clinical questions that our so harsh, so uncomfortable, that they challenge our very humanity as healthcare providers. The clinical challenge in this morbidity and mortality review is precisely one such instance: What is the appropriate management when a pregnant woman comes in from a [...]
Posted in Mortality Reviews, Patient Stories on Jun 7th, 2010
Posted by Duncan Maru, MD, PHD All too often in our work, we are confronted by deaths of young people that are devastating by their impact on families and communities and by the fact of their being so preventable. The death of this young pregnant woman and her child, described below in the mortality report [...]
Posted in Logistics and Management, Mortality Reviews on Oct 29th, 2009
Posted by Duncan Maru, MD, PHD Nyaya Health is undertaking an innovative experiment in operations management by reviewing all deaths that occur at the Bayalpata hospital and identifying systems-level changes to prevent future deaths. Programs aimed at assessing the root causes of deaths can help to assess effectiveness and can identify programmatic weaknesses. Implementing such [...]
Posted in Logistics and Management, News on Oct 4th, 2009
Posted by Dan Schwarz It has now been several weeks since our last update on the cholera epidemic that has plagued Achham and other parts of Nepal in recent months, and we are happy to report that it has been waning as the monsoon season comes to an end. At Bayalpata Hospital, we have seen [...]