crunching numbers

Last night I stayed up until 2 am working on our version of mortality and morbidity for our patients under one month of age. Every 3 months, we look long and hard at our statistics, our patients that died, and figure out how we can do things better.  The pediatricians that established pediatrics as a department set incredible standards that we work to maintain and improve. Every patient and family is incredibly precious, and we want to make sure we are doing things in the best way possible.

One of the neurosurgeons here summed it up best when I came. . .just because we are in an area with lower resources does not mean we have to provide substandard care. When the neonatal statistics were published for Kenya last year, we realized we have the best medical care you can get (statistics wise) for neonates in Kenya, and we want to maintain that.

So here are a couple screenshots so you can see the care we provide:

The first slide is our mortality by age of the baby. We take care of 16-20 babies under 1.5 pounds a year, and many just bigger than that who do really well and go home. We help our surgeons take care of surgical and neurosurgical babies and a multitude of birth defects.  This year with small interventions and excellent nursing, we are on track to cut our mortality almost in half – more precious babies going home with their mamas, more lives that we get to be intimately involved in while their babies learn to grow and thrive.

We also had a outbreak of a pretty serious bacteria during the quarter I was examining, and when I looked at studies exploring these kind of outbreaks world wide, I became really proud of what we did.  Jennifer Myhre, on call the weekend it started, recognized it immediately. Within 3 days with the help of the administration, we had significant interventions in place, and the staff and consultants worked tirelessly to get it under control. From isolation to staffing to things as simple as gowns and hand washing, we are still working every day to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

(the drugs the bacteria was resistant too was sobering)

Starred interventions are the ones we implemented, 2x as many as other institutions that have faced them – a reason we were able to control it in approximately half the expected time.

I am extremely excited to be part of this team and maintaining such a high standard of care. We do what most people on the outside would say is impossible.

But we know the One who is able. As we continually strive to improve, we are grateful that He allows us to multiply the loaves and fishes and do much with little.