Stories from the Field
October 12, 2008
Engineering Students Deliver, Fix Medical Equipment Around the World
Jenna Maloka (Pratt, Class of 2009) didn’t expect to see babies dying from the cold in Africa. “I was in Arusha, Tanzania, and it was winter,” she says. “I wore a fleece each day, and in the hospital where I worked, the incubator was broken. Two baby twins died from the cold while we were there. That’s when we figured we had to do something.”
Thanks to the Duke-Engineering World Health Summer Institute that Maloka was participating in, she had the tools at hand to “do something.” Maloka was one of 49 students involved in this year’s two-month program that put engineering students to work in hospitals in Tanzania, Nicaragua, and Honduras. The students fixed old equipment, set up thousands of dollars worth of donated medical equipment, and trained doctors, nurses, and staff how to use and maintain the equipment.
Rhut Vasavada (Duke BME, 2009) is working on one of the few working sterilizers in one of the the largest hospitals in Arusha, Tanzania. The seals are leaking causing steam to escape into the room, putting the nurses at risk of burns and slowing down the sterilization process. Rhut is going to replace the seals on the gauge class he is holding.
Often, the solutions EWH participants come up with involve a combination of finding, fixing, and training. At Huruma hospital in Rombo, Tanzania, the EWH volunteers installed an electrocardiogram (ECG) monitor donated from the Duke Global Health PLUS program. The students soon discovered that the electrodes needed for the machine were not available at the hospital. Knowing that the ECG monitor was useless without electrodes, the students traveled to Nairobi, Kenya – the nearest source of electrodes—to purchase the necessary equipment. The students also arranged for visiting doctors from Holland to help teach the physicians at Huruma how to read an ECG. Now that the hospital has a functioning ECG monitor, and physicians who know how to use it, patients who come in with chest pain have a much greater chance of being correctly diagnosed.
In Arusha, Maloka and her two EWH colleagues struggled to solve the problem of tiny newborns protected from the elements only by a thin cotton cloth. “We tried fixing the incubator, but it was really, really old,” says Jenna. “We tried everything we could think of, but we couldn’t get it to work. What we did instead was adapt a space heater to the room. We had it welded above the baby crib and tested it to make sure it wasn’t too hot. So we found a solution, even it if wasn’t fixing the incubator.”
The students involved in the 2008 EWH Summer Institute came from Duke and 20 other American and English universities. They all received one month of training in language, culture, and technical matters. “The program gives these students the opportunity to refurbish and repair the donated equipment, so they have lots of hands-on learning,” said Malkin. This year’s donations included items such as an automatic blood pressure machine for an operating room at St. Elizabeth hospital in Arusha, and an electrosurgery machine at Kibosho Hospital in Moshi, Tanzania.
The intense summer program has solidified Maloka’s desire to continue to make a difference in low and middle-income countries. She is participating in Malkin’s course Design for a Developing World. “One of the projects I am working on is to create a curriculum to teach technicians in Arusha and elsewhere how to troubleshoot the most common problems we found,” she says.
“We learned so much this summer. It was great to get our hands on so much equipment, and also to work alongside Tanzanians doing their everyday jobs,” said Maloka. “By the end of the program I had worked on everything from blood pressure cuffs and cast cutters to an old German clothes dryer! I learned a lot about equipment and a lot about Africa. But the best part was being able to apply skills and to see how it helped patients.”
For more information about the EWH Summer Institute, visit http://www.ewh.org/summer/index.php.
Applications for the 2009 Summer Institute will open in mid October.