On Friday, I was able to finally finish my little project that contributed to Rice’s HRME study, and send the results back to Dr. Richards-Kortum! In short, what I did was show normal vs. abnormal (pre-cancer or cancerous) pictures of cervix cells to the nurses from the cervical cancer screening clinics at PMH and Bontleng, and then ask them to take a short quiz in which they identified whether pictures showed normal or abnormal cells. The quiz results would give us an idea of how the end-users of the HRME device would perform with a very small amount of training.

For the technologies, I’ve been working with Tefo, a Rice grad student who worked in Botswana for a project, to find methods of sterilizing the SAPHE Pad. We found that the Bokamoso Hospital had plasma sterilization available, but unfortunately, getting permission to actually use it is the difficult part.

For my daily work at the clinic, I’ve been working on the Women’s Health Clinic Cervical Cancer Screening database. I go through the patient files, identify discrepancies between the paper file and the online data, and fix the problems to the best of my ability. Then, I record the problem and the changes I made on a verification log that I send to Pinkie at the end of every day. Sometimes, it gets a little tedious, but getting the database to work and show the correct figures is of such utmost importance that I’m happy to take that on as my on-site project. Sadly, with around 5000 patient files to go through, I don’t think I’ll be able to completely verify all the files before I leave at the end of this month. Hopefully I’ll set up a good system that’ll keep going until all the files are verified, though.

During my last week here, I plan to follow up with the Cancer Association of Botswana and Botswana Retired Nurses Society to see if they have thought of any ideas. Mma Monare also wrote a letter for me to get permission from the hospital superintendent to observe in the Accidents & Emergencies and Paediatrics wards!