Week Three

This week the Gambian students and ourselves have completed the last of our visits to health organisations and clinics. On Monday morning we met with senior officials at CIAM, a public heath research and development centre that has expanded from merely researching and tracking malaria in Gambia, to monitoring and evaluating HIV and Malaria, capacity building (training individuals on monitoring and evaluation techniques) and public engagement.

The medical students then visited the case study and her mother at their home, as the case study was discharged from the Royal Victoria Teaching Hospital last week. It was incredibly interesting and helpful to visit them at home, as we were able to gather more information on the feeding habits of the mother, details of the case’s siblings and the home environment itself – all vital information for evaluating the broader social, environmental and developmental determinants of malnutrition.

Yesterday we were able to go on a ward round with the medical team at the MRC (Medical Research Council), which for our medical students in particular, was a great experience. The ward round was extremely beneficial to our project, as almost all of the patients on the ward, though suffering from different conditions such as malaria, pneumonia and diarrheal illness, had a background of malnutrition – highlighting the severity of the problem in Gambia, and the need for alternative approaches in tackling malnutrition, such as ours.

Further visits to the case study and her mother are planned for this week, which we are really looking forward to. The mother has been so incredibly welcoming to us, and to being interviewed for the project. These visits aside, the writing of the project is now our main focus. We were able to start writing this afternoon, which has been a real boost to all of us, as we can now begin to see all of our hard work and research during the past two and a half weeks start to take shape in a written form. Numerous health organisations and international bodies will see the final report, and we’re hopeful it will make a real difference not only in the approach to tacking malnutrition, but to encouraging the formation of multi-disciplinary, partnership projects in the future.