Health records in Patent Medicine Stores in rural communities in Nigeria

Community: Bayanloco - Kafanchan

Location: Bayanloco/Kafanchan ,Nigeria

Contacts

Name E-mail Phone
Kazanka Comfort fantsuamfoundation@fantsuam.com
Dr John Dada johndada@fanstuam.com 07957 361 767
fantsuamfoundation@fantsuam.com c/o UK 0113 2164185

Description

Each student will be required to describe the types of health problems commonly encountered in their communities. The primary health provider in most rural communities in Nigeria is the Patent Medicine Store. Students will seek attachment with these stores and collect data of the various ailments which are presented each week, noting down the age and gender of the patients. Most Patent Medicine Stores do not keep records of their treatments, and neither do the patients. This initiative is aimed at promoting a recording system which can be developed into a database. There is often no option of attending a hospital emergency department, most health problems are handled by the Patent Medicine Store dealers, who unfortunately do not always have any previous medical training

Additional Notes

I Have been on a trip to Bangladesh and just returned home yesterday. Since
the acknowledgement to our on-line application, this mail of 15th Sept, is
the only one I have seen. Can you re-send the mail (s) which we may have
missed please? I am making haste to reply to this one, kindly confirm that
it gets to you.

We are still interested in participating in the CIS Class with your students
at Evergreen State College and I will be able to work with our students for
the next nine months. The project fits in with our Community Learning
Centres project which is on-going and will continue beyond the life of the
CIS project.

IT knowledge and skills are still a novelty in our communities so we have
tried to be cautious about our expectations. While we have a crop of
enthusiastic and excited students, we recognize the limitations of our
facilities. For example, we aim at a twice weekly internet connection - when
our satellite telephone system is in place by January, we will be able to
double this. We and our students accept our limitations as challenges and
remain realistic about what we can expect.

We have a few ideas of what a web application can do for us and we will ask
you to give it a think and let me know if you require more information to
enable the students to develop it please:

An on-line registration of rural health workers which will be included in a
memebrship database: basic biodata of members will be required for the
registration. This registration will be used to identify members expertise
so that they can be contacted to provide information or training when
necessary to other members. Training and information on common diseases in
our environment: diarrheoa, meningitis, tuberculosis, leprosy, smallpox,
malaria, river blindness, epilepsy, sickle-cell anaemia, diabetes, sexual
health for adolescents and women, are areas of expertise we will identify
through the database. Disease surveillance, diagnosis and treatment options
will also feature in the registration.

As we indicated in our application, we want to develop a simple database to
keep record of the incidence of these diseases at the various patent
medicine stores and health clinics wgere they are treated.

Other Information

Other objectives

Data collected by the students will be used in our HIV/AIDS awareness campaigns among adolescents. The data will also be used to encourage the decelopment a database of patient records by the Medicisne Stores.