This is the Mission of Hospice Africa Uganda

Today my voice just about gave out after running the first Pharmaceutical Care Skills Lab (PCSL) twice in a row.  The lab session is 3 hours long and most of the time, students are actively working in groups to role-play patient care scenarios and then solve them using drug information resources.  The lecture time is kept to a minimum, if at all. But, since this is the first week of classes, the students needed to have some baseline knowledge and skills before trying to interview patients so I had to give a 1-hr lecture on Basic Patient Interviewing Skills as well as a 1-hr lecture on the disease content that would be the background of the scenario for the role-play.  I chose to use the topic of Palliative Care and Pain Management as the content for this session first of all because I wanted to teach something that the students don’t already learn in their current curriculum but also because I learned about the wonderful work of Dr. Anne Merriman who started Hospice Africa Uganda 20 years ago and the work of Dr. Mhoira Leng who is head of Palliative Care at Mulago National Hospital and how they are improving the quality of life for patients with chronic illnesses and pain.  (See the past posts of March 6 and March 9, 2014 for more information.)  Anyway, the lab sessions seemed to go well. I was really pleased with the efforts and interactions of the students with me and each other. They also had such excellent questions.  Since I got really busy with teaching today, I totally forgot to take any pictures soinstead I’m using some from my last trip to spice up this page.

On Thursday I will be working with the Pharmacy Interns at Mulago Hospital.  Three of them are going to be presenting a Case about a patient with HIV and teaching the other Interns about how to care for a patient with HIV. I have been asked to help precept them through this experience so tonight I am prepping by reading up on HIV treatment.  Although I teach Infectious Diseases in the curriculum, I am not responsible for the HIV content and my current practice site in the USA is working in a community hospital with a family medicine team so we are not responsible for managing the Antiretroviral Therapy for HIV patients.  Thus, I’ll end this blog so I can study up a bit.