Screening Day!!

The major event of this week was the screening days; we spent 2 days at a local stadium about 20 minutes from the ship and screened everybody to see if we were able to help them.

They queued up all down the road outside the stadium, some of the guys on security had to get there at 3:30 in the morning to start ‘crowd control’ trying to work out a queue system that people might try and follow, people had travelled from miles and stayed overnight to be there.

It is a long process, and on the first day we screened just fewer than 2000 patients. Basically each patient has to go through certain stages... First there is a pre-screening outside the stadium, where they try and immediately spot people who we can’t help, for example we can’t help any patients with cancer as we have no way of doing any follow up, and there are certain types of surgery we don’t have the ability to do. We also have separate screenings for eye patients, so the eye patients were sent off with information about those. Those who got through the pre-screening then went inside the stadium, where they were registered, then waited in line to have their history taken, they would then be send to the appropriate queue to see a surgeon, whether it be orthopaedics, max-fax, plastics, general surgery or VVF etc. Once they had seen the surgeon, if it was decided that surgery was to go ahead, they would have a physical done, and then they would wait to have an appointment made either for surgery or for x-rays and other scans on the ship...they would then be sent to either have bloods taken or to the pharmacy area to get vitamins etc to make sure they were fit for surgery.... finally a picture was taken of them as a ‘before’ photo and they then got there appointment card!

It was an immense process and once inside the stadium the patients were queuing for hours... everyone there was helping out in different areas, such as giving out water to make sure no one was dehydrated or escorting the patients to make sure they went in the right queue next. We also set up a play area in the middle for kids where we entertained them for the day!

There were obviously people that we couldn’t help, which was tough...but we also had prayer stations where if the patients wanted prayer before they went people prayed with them.

I absolutely loved both days and it really inspired me a lot, it was sometimes tough escorting people off the premises because we couldn’t help them... but I saw some amazing people. I’ve been thinking a lot recently how it was quite scary that I pretty much have the next 7 years of my life accounted for in terms of being in medical school, but in the last few days I have had a new found inspiration and maybe one day I’ll get to come back and work with these people from the hospital side of things!

I’m sorry there are no photos at the moment, we weren’t allowed to take photos at the screening but the communications team did so I’ll try and find some of theirs and put them up when I can.


Much Love

Jen