Xela Day Six: Implementation

More than half our our crew parted ways to do a mobile clinic today, whereas Irv, Shelley and I stayed behind with Dr Christian and a few med students to attempt to get the EMR functional in a way which would jive with the clinic’s workflow. I hit quite a few snags in some of the UI implementation, since I have been pretty hands-off in the development of the UI over the last few months. Even with that, we managed to get the registration and triage components up and operational, while at the same time stringing category 5 cable around the clinic.

(Again, my job called me for another favor — this time a load balancer reconfiguration. I wonder if I get comp’d vacation time for this?)

So, after a day of implementation and clinic beautification, the POP-WUJ Clinic looks much better than it did before we arrived. The staff doctors thanked us all profusely for our help in making the clinic a nicer place — however, there was one moment which Jonathan referred to as the “pay it forward” moment. A local carpenter’s wife had been seen in the clinic, and he noticed that one of the doors seemed ill-fitted in regards to the frame in which it sat. He came back down later that day and refitted the door by shaving it down properly as a sort of thanks for the clinic having attended to his wife.

As an end of week “send off”, Dr Sullivan and her husband invited us over to their house for some wine and cheese. The whole thing would probably have been a little bit better if the sky hadn’t opened up with a monsoon on our way over, but thankfully most of us were wearing suitable rain gear. On the way back, we got lost trying to drop Shelley off at her host family’s house, so Irv and I ended up taking a cab back to Casa Mañen, more or less completely drenched.

It has been a fantastic week, and we have accomplished a great deal — but I’m getting to the point where I really miss being home. One more day of picking up stuff for the wife at the local market, driving to Antigua for Saturday evening, and I’m on a series of planes back to New England. Maybe we didn’t save the world this week, but at least we did our best to make some improvement, somewhere.