Week Eleven from the Field: General Hospital Kochi

This last week was amazing. I was actually disappointed that I wasn’t able to get this post up sooner but that’s the way things go.

I have been so inundated with new opportunities that I’ve found it hard to focus on anything other than research. Now that I am done with my interviews and the collection of some 300 surveys has gone pretty seamlessly I’ve found it easy to catch up on some of the more extraneous parts of this experience. This post however is being focused on an amazing experience that I had last week visiting a Government Hospital in the neighboring state of Kerala.

Where we live in Tamil Nadu is in close proximity to the neighboring state of Kerala by only about a 30 min bus ride to get to the boarder. Last Thursday I got together with Emma to take a short trip over to the capital of Kerala, Kochi. We went to take advantage of an offer that I got to visit one of the Government Hospital. I received this offer from a young and amiable doctor that I met at Ortho One Hospital here in Coimbatore. His name is Dr Cherian and he is an orthopedic surgeon at the hospital. He offered to give Emma and me a private tour when I told him about our research projects. Emma came along to get a separate tour of the maternity ward and the gynecology department. It was an amazing trip.

In one day I got to see so intimately the workings and structure of one of the hardest to enter facilities in India. The fact is that there is a lot to be done. I realized after my visit that a General Hospital is a scary and hard place to go into and not come out a different person. 

I have visited once the main medical college here in Coimbatore and the comparison even between the two was dismal. The general hospital in Kochi is supposed to be the best in India. Thus as far as General Hospital standards go it was excellent but in all reality they know and the government knows that there has to be huge strides made in medical care if they are to provide a place of safe reliable medical care for their citizens.

I was also able to tour the Operation Theatre. In a matter of an hour and a half I saw 5 surgeries. The doctor then had one of the administrators of the hospital lead me around for the rest of the day. After the surgeries we watched in the morning, Emma was taken straight to maternity ward and spent the rest of the day with the gynecologist. I was able to see everything from, the optometrist’s operation theatre to the nuclear medicine department where the best attempts of oncology procedures are taken out. It was quite the afternoon and I really began to see and understand the struggles that each of the department was facing with limited and under qualified staff. I was also able to observe the ever constant need for more and more resources from the Government that weren’t being allocated correctly. I found it insightful to take some time and talk with the patients about their experience in the hospital. Most of the reports were pretty depressing as they explained that they came as a last resort. However for all of the heartbreaks, the silver lining was that the general hospital in Kochi still outperforms many private hospitals all over India. I am hoping to use the interviews with Dr Cherian and the literature that they gave me for my lit review for my final paper. It has also been a huge help to see the workings of all these systems to make a more accurate evaluation of the status of healthcare currently in India.

This will be my second last blog due to the ending of our projects. We leave next week, which will mark our 13th week in the field. Look out for one more post before I return home.

Week Nine From the Field: Mid Semester Retreat - Research Update

Blog # 5

This weekend was great. We got to go see some of the best sites that Southern India has to offer. All five of us went together and we went to Kanyakumari first. We took a sleeper train down there Friday morning, stayed two nights and got to see some really great stuff. I know that the office wants our Mid Semester retreats to be an escape from our projects but since I am interested in alternative forms of medicine I was constantly on the look out for healers and different places where people could receive medical care in the city. Kanyakumari was beautiful in one aspect but as far as Indian cities go, it was also lacking a lot. The city is more of a tourist destination than anything and the infrastructure and systems are sorely outdated. The general hospital is small and outdated. In order to receive any substantial medical care you would need to be transported all the way to Trivandrum in the next state over almost 90 km away to get decent attention.

We also were able to stay in a really nice hotel on the top floor for the equivalent of around 3 us dollars per person. The views were immaculate and the sunsets and sunrises, which are what Kanyakumari is known for, were breathtaking. We left the next night for Rameswaram the next night on another sleeper train that went through the night saving us more money on hotels.

When we arrived at 5 am in Rameswaram the city was already buzzing. There were people everywhere and we went pretty much unnoticed. We ended up next to the section of the Rameswaram bay that is considered holy water and were very entertained by the religious washing practices of the people there. It was interesting to see. The men strip down into either a Lungi or their underwear and women go in wearing a full saree. They go under several times using buckets to dump the holy water on their heads with their hands and or plastic containers that the poor sell on your way to the water.

After that ceremony is done you walk sopping wet to the temple in the middle of the city, which is beautiful and you go through a 22 step process of ceremonial washings to cleanse you of any bad or evil spirits. This belief is derived from a long held cultural belief in the significant events that took place in Hindu and Indian history on the island of Rameswaram.

We spent the rest of the first day on the beach at Dhanushkodi, which is the point of the island closest to Sri Lanka. I was also to contact some medical providers and I had the rickshaw driver tell me stories about medicine during all of the driving we did that day to get down to the beach. I was able to visit and look around some of the medical facilities in Rameswaram and it was an interesting contrast to the city hospitals that I always visit here.

We took another train from Rameswaram the night after we got there and went straight to Madurai. We all had tickets to leave Madurai the next morning but I had to come back early so I went ahead and booked a ticket that took me straight through to Coimbatore. It was pretty expensive because there were no more sleeper car spots so I paid 8 US dollars to get an AC sleeper car that was super nice and worth every penny of it. I made it home yesterday morning and went straight back to the hospital to continue my rounds.

The research is going well and I even made plans yesterday to take a trip to Kochi next weekend to tour the major General Hospital there with one of the head doctors who I ran into at Ortho One here. I will be doing that for two days next week and the gentleman has offered to put me up. I will find out more when he emails me back but he is expecting me next Thursday at the hospital.

Well I am still ling here in my hammock and I couldn’t be hungrier. The group all just got back and I am going to head in to the city to meet up with Steven and the girls for lunch after Steven gets done with shadowing doctors/dentist in the city. Things are going great and we are all nice and relaxed ready to blow this research out of the water in the last couple of weeks that we have here.