Global

Experience 1: Engineering World Health Summer Institute 

I spent this summer in Guatemala. For 3 weeks, I took intense Spanish classes in the morning, and theory  of medical devices in the afternoon. For the following 5 weeks, I lived in Retalhuleu, a small town near the west coast of Guatemala, where I worked in a regional hospital fixing medical devices. I was able to work on ultrasounds, aspirators, patient monitors, infant incubators, blood pressure cuffs, autoclaves, pulse oximeters and bili lights amongst other devices. In total, my team and I fixed about 100 medical devices. 

In addition to fixing medical devices, we were able to work on secondary projects to address some of the problems we saw. We noticed that many aspirators kept breaking as fluid from the patient would get sucked into the motor as the doctors did not have access to disposable filters. We were able to make resuable filters from small paint containers that were filled with gauze, which could be easily changed. We also noticed that the most broken device were blood pressure cuffs, which also happened to be the device that was reported as most useful by doctors and nurses. The hot weather in Retalhuleau lead to the breakdown of the rubber tubing, bladders and bulbs of the blood pressure cuffs, resulting in air leaks. Using materials from the dollar store, we were able to make replacement bulbs and bladders.  We held a lecture for 80 doctors, nurses and medical students about the repairs they could perform for blood pressure cuffs even after we left. Lastly, we noticed that a large problem in the hospital that led to a shortage of many medical devices, such as patient monitors, was a lack of communication between departments. Oftentimes, we found a device missing a piece in one department, and just this spare piece in another department. To encourage communication, we developed a form that the nurses or docotrs would fill out everytime they had a broken piece of equipment, and made a digital system for the inventory department where these details can be recorded. By building a database, we hoped to identify extra components of equipment and reduce wastage. 

Ultimately, I learnt a lot about the real issues faced in low resource areas - user error, no maintainence of devices, inability to access disposable parts - which will help me engineer better medicine that can solve these issues in a sustainable way in the future.