Antenatal Clinic

Today was my first day in the antenatal clinic at the LCECU. It is held once a week, and is quite busy, more so than when I was here last year.

Last year Sara and I had developed new forms for use in our clinic. Until April of 2005, our clinic provided prenatal care, but we did not deliver patients, With that change, our charting changed, too. One of my jobs in clinic was to determine if the forms were working as they should, and if they were being utilized appropriately.

We saw a large number of returning patients, and fourteen new ones. It was the first chance for the nurses to use the dopplers I had brought in the clinic, and they really enjoyed them. Not only could they find the fetal heartbeat in a noisy room more easily, but one of the dopplers even gave a digital readout of the rate! Thanks again to Doctor Bayram, my boss for donating them. He is a hero in Vellore.

Dr. Kiruba and I also had a chance to try out the new ultrasound machine that Sara had somehow gotten donated to the eLCECU. It is a beautiful machine, and very new, so no one has used it yet to speak of, Kiruba an dI played with it, figuring out how to see and measure with it, and then tried it out on our new OB patients. We decided to try and scan them all, partly for our education, and partly to ascertain gestational ages with more accuracy. To our surprise, three of the ten patients we scanned has horribly incorrect dates (more than two months off). All of the patients were shown their babies, and enjoyed that experience.

There's a lot of work to be done, but we got off to a good start today!