Hooray for English medical charts!!... wait, Houston we have a problem

I have talked a little bit about health care, medical education, and practice here in Ethiopia but I really think it deserves its own post.

One of the first things I noticed from clinic on Sunday was that all of the medical charts are in English. Convenient but curious. The reason that this is the case is that there are no medical texts written in Amharic so from the beginning of medical school all of their reading is in English. This creates one large problem: Many of the medical students speak and read very limited English which leads to obvious difficulties in comprehension and thus deficits in practice.

Each year in Addis 300+ students begin medical school. One of the doctors guessed that there are only 200 left by the end of year one and "there is no telling how many quit each year after that".

After graduation the physicians I spoke to project that 75% of these new doctors attempt immigration legally or otherwise to the US where they often never work as physicians. One physician told us that several American exchange programs have stopped accepting ethiopian physicians because they would always disappear just before the program finished. Currently there are only 500 some Ethiopian physicians registered in Ethiopia.

Another problem in health care here is that the state hospitals do not pay well. This leads to almost every physician having a second private job that they rush out leaving residents and medical students to take care of patients alone also leading to deficits in card.

An interesting fact: plastic surgeons are among the least respected physicians here. There is no such thing as elective cosmetic surgery in Ethiopia. This is because they only treat burn patients and lepers so it is not at all lucrative.

Pictures:
The Internet hotspot at the hospital
The maternity ward
The nicu
Post op
A runaway patient :)