10 August 2022

Today we filmed the Hospital Pharmaceutical Care training videos at the new Makerere University Dentistry Hospital. This place was state-of-the-art and just opened in May 2022. The dental chairs are fancier than the ones my dentist uses at home. They kindly allowed us to use one of their procedure suites which contained a hospital bed.

Nickson and Paul lived up to their acting caliber on the first day of filming and we added another actor, Clovis Mawanda, 4th year pharmacy student. Clovis portrayed the patient who had a bandaged head secondary to head trauma. He technically had the easiest job which was just to lay in the bed, but I imagine laying still for several hours, was also tiring or at the least, very boring. In addition, he had powerful lights shining down on him the whole time. The learning goal for the videos today was to teach the pharmacy students how to communicate with a physician or other health care provider using the SBAR technique. This is a way to communicate the appropriate information in an organized way (Situation then Background then Assessment then Plan). In these scenarios, the pharmacist identified one or more drug therapy problems and wanted to offer the physician a recommendation about how to improve patient care for the patient.

Once again I thought these straightforward scenarios would not take long to film but not so. It was a bit shorter than yesterday, but the film crew needed multiple takes from multiple directions to create the best outcome. By the way, I had a sneak peek of one of the completed scenarios from yesterday, albeit a draft, and it was great! I’m excited for Makerere to use this in training. In fact, I might even use these videos to teach my students about pharmacy practice in Uganda and to give them a flavor for the culture.

This evening I enjoyed a delicious meal at the closest mall to Mulago Guest House, Acacia Mall. The restaurant is called Caffesserie and I me a brand new friend there. From time to time people reach out to me from reading my blog and a few years ago, a woman named Grace did that and told me she and her sister were living in the US but had been born in Uganda and her sister, Idah, is a pharmacist in Pennsylvania. Well we never got together until now when by a huge coincidence, Idah, Grace, and their families were back in Uganda visiting their Mom and family all over Uganda. Today I met Idah for dinner and we had a great talk both about pharmacy practice in the USA, the good and bad of retail pharmacy, as well as the practice of pharmacy in Uganda. It was a lovely evening and I’m so glad to have a new friend!