Week 1 (May 13-19)
Research Experience
This was my first week in the hospital in Iringa. Every day, we attended the morning meeting and then shadowed doctors on ward rounds. In the morning meeting, the lead doctors and nurses who worked the night shift tell the others about a few standout cases and also give a general overview of the state of the hospital. It is also an opportunity for any worker to bring up a grievance. The meetings are supposed to happen in English but often include a lot of Swahili as well. On Monday and Tuesday, we attended the rounds in the female ward, so we got to see the doctor interact with each patient and determine what they needed. On Tuesday we also spent some time observing in the minor theater. On Wednesday, we did the same in the male ward. Grand rounds (when all the doctors round together) are on Thursdays, so I attended that for a little bit and then I went to the physical therapist's office and watched her treat patients. So far, it has been a little difficult to conduct research in the way I had envisioned due to my language barrier. Next week we will start with our interpreters, so that should help with the language barrier and also enable Jacob and me to do our own things independent of Megan and each other. It was also difficult at first to know what to do in the hospital, and I often felt out of place and kind of useless. This has improved throughout the week as I've gotten to know the doctors and hospital better, and being in more one-on-one settings like the minor theater and the physical therapist's office was more comfortable and more conducive to research.
Findings
The goal of this week was mostly to get used to the hospital environment and figure out how I wanted my research to go, so I haven't made much 'progress' yet in my findings. Every day I take fieldnotes in a notebook during my time at the hospital and then when I get back to the house I type them up in a more detailed narrative form. So far, I have collected some terms for pain that have been used by both doctors and patients in both Swahili and English. I have also asked a few doctors some informal questions about pain assessment, and have found that they feel that they are able to assess a patient's pain by looking at them and don't feel the need to use any kind of pain scale. Similarly, they have said that although they did learn about pain assessment in medical school, their real knowledge and training has come from their experience as doctors. They also tend to see pain as a symptom of a problem and often feel that their job is to alleviate that pain. Next week I hope to conduct some recorded interviews and maybe test out my free-listing pile-sorting ethnographic method.
