The wards

A few weeks back, E wrote about the families taking care of their loved ones on the hospital wards. As you can imagine, this lends itself to a very busy, crowded and noisy ward and we thought that you guys might like to see what we mean.

Imagine yourself trying to get a child calm before surgery or to fall asleep on the floor next to your child's bed in this room. It would be pretty tough for us as Americans since most hospitals are now full of private rooms and relatively low nurse to patient ratios. Also, you'll notice there's no electronic monitoring of vital signs that helps alert physicians or nurses of a crisis and sounds an alarm. I'm sure you'll notice a lot of differences between the US and Kenya, I know we did.

I took this at Kenyatta hospital in Nairobi but it's pretty reflective of any public hospital in Kenya (and actually better than some). The white lady you see at the end is the visiting urologist from Switzerland since I took this as we rounded on pre-operative patients.