So earlier this year,
me and a group of doctors from Cambridge travelled to Sudan
for a medical mission trip with a team of Sudanese
Doctors, health care professionals and medical students from Houghton University.
We set up six medical clinics in villages in northern Sudan.
This is the Sudan medical adventure.
Day 1, we arrived in for (Tomb?) and head to a restaurant in the city centre.
"Welcome Sudan, this is our first day in the trip.
We've all just landed and we're having our first organizational
team meeting with the rest of the doctors.
Everyone, say hello.
"Hello"
We drive through the city across the River Nile to our host family's house
and I apparently runs the entire length of the country pretty
much, so we'll be seeing at various different point in our journey
It's very exciting and then get demolished at FIFA by some medical students before heading to bed.
Day 2, we wake at the crack of
dawn and head to Houghton University Medical School with boxes full of drugs and other medical supplies.
All right. So this here is our box of drugs and syringes and things.
"They came from, um,
different companies and they've supported us with some financial support."
We make friends with some of the students there who treat us to some traditional Sudanese food.
Cheers.
"Cheers."
Oh, very nice.
Then we load up the bus and join the 75 students and 20 doctors, lab technicians and pharmacists and had
500 kilometres north to Marui.
So we're about halfway through the journey,
we've been driving for the last four hours and
all there is around us is just deserts.
After 8 hours of driving through the desert
We arrive at the resort, debrief and head to our room
"Wow, look at this."
Yes mate.
Oh, we got a balcony as well
Isn't that really pretty
It's gonna be a solid spot to fly the drone from tomorrow morning.
Day 3 is when the fun really starts.
We split up into three teams, each with
25 medical students and a handful of doctors and lab technicians, my team
drives an hour through the desert to reach a village called Village 5.
We set up our clinic at the local primary school
and for the rest of the day the medical students see all of the patients
with our team of doctors overseeing the process
All right. So this is the school that we've been in for the past day and here's how the patient flow work
So they start off in the triage area over there
and that's where they get seen by some of our doctors and some of our fourth
year medical students and they take a quick history
Do the vital signs for their pulse blood pressure respiratory rate
and kind of triage them as to how urgency they need to be seen.
Then once a patient has been triage they get given this form and then they get sent
one of the clinic rooms over there or over there and we've been in these clinic rooms all day
Just kind of seeing the patients as they come in
Taking a full history doing an examination and then some patients just need reassurance and a bit of analgesia
They can get that from the pharmacy which is over there. We've got a pharmacist
We've got a supply of drugs, but then some patients need further investigations.
So then, we send them over to our
hematology and biochemistry lab that we've got set up and that's where we can do things like a full blood count, urea electrolytes, uh, Urinalysis
fecal analysis, that sort of stuff
and then they come back to the clinic and then we sort them out based on the results of those investigations
So this is actually a pretty great setup the medical students see the
patients and talk to them in Arabic and then when they're done
They present the case to one of the doctors and we double-check the management plan.
This means that overall we provide a really good cost effective service for patients
who don't normally get to see doctors and at the same
time we're helping train up the medical students in their clinical
reasoning and physical examination skills and
rather than just providing a medical and educational service
We also provide some entertainment for the local schoolchildren
by busting out the drone and letting them play with it, a little bit
(Music)
Day 4 is a final clinical day. And so, our three teams drive to three more villages in northern Sudan
All right. So here we are in the village of Alba Heap. We came here this morning.
And again, it's the same setup as yesterday
We now have two triage rooms one; for the men and one for the women,
and then we've got two clinic rooms that they get
Triaged into and we've got a pharmacy and we've got our lab going on overall. It's been pretty chilled today
We don't have quite as many patients as we had yesterday
So there was quite a good opportunity to teach some of the medical students
We ran through the cardiovascular, the cranial nerves and knee examination.
And these guys been really friendly, they cooked food for us
Which was very tasty
"And they're so generously, they gave us the kind of brunch
different types of meals and there's this coming year this actually be
Sheep intestine." (Chuckle) So with our bellies comfortably full with sheep intestine
we drive back to the resort to debrief we get together with the other teams
share some presentations about interesting cases that we'd all seen across the two days and
Roberto's team deliver the performance of a traditional Arabic song
for everyone entertainment. All right, so it's final day of the trip
We've done our two days of the medical mission and this morning
We spent a couple of hours doing some lectures for the medical students
We did a talk about research methods in medicine and to talk about how to prepare for exams
Such as the postgraduate medical exams like the MRCP and now
we're gonna spend the rest of the day just hanging out with the students
and the other doctors.
At the moment, we're by the River Nile. Is this the River Nile? "Yea"
And then we're gonna head back to (Hatume?) - there's gonna be a fun day bus journey
Hopefully see some pyramids on the way. Just, you know, have a nice social bonding experience
So that was our medical adventure in Sudan over the five days. We explored some of the beautiful landscape
We saw and treated hundreds of patients who would have otherwise had very limited access to health care
and we made friends with some absolutely
wonderful pharmacist, technicians, medical students and doctors along the way
Thank you for watching
If you'd like to know more about the medical mission or
if you'd like to find out more about how you can get involved with
doing cool stuff like this
There's gonna be a link in the video description that will give you some more information.
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