Day 221, The people on the television were telling me what to do with my psychiatric patients. They listened to what I said and told me which ones I should report to the police and which ones I should just give drugs to. Of course I wasn’t alone, the patients were there too, but they had their own problems.
As I approached the makeshift clinic this morning I walked past three peacocks strutting around the hospital grounds, that was probably my first clue that today was going to be a bit loopy. I am sure they were there, I took a picture of them, but no one else seems to believe me. Perhaps I empathised a bit too much with the psychiatric patients, after all I inadvertently ended up spending a whole morning with them and their special television.
Just before one wonders whether the pressures of working in the bush have completely broken my sanity I was indeed talking to the television through the wonders of telemedicine. This is a system that was set up several years ago to try and connect rural hospitals to specialists who wouldn’t physically be able to visit often. It is essentially a package consisting of a webcam, a mic and an ISDN line that helped me connect to the psychiatrists at our referral centre.
The initial plan was to have the psychiatrist fly out to us but a technical servicing issue had grounded the flight. Rather than completely lose the time with her we fired up the telemedicine system in the hope that everything still worked. Like Dr Jones finding the Ark of the Covenant I felt I had unearthed something mystical from an ancient time, circa 2005. After a few quick calls to tech support I found myself staring at three psychiatrists on the TV screen ironically asking the patients questions about hallucinations and hearing voices. It does bring a whole new dimension to the term thought broadcast.
The session wasn’t without its teething problems but it is genuine achievement that in a place like Mseleni we are able to have viable consultation with a remote doctor through technology. This is especially wondrous as most of my blogs have been eeked out on a GPRS connection that struggles with even letting me check emails.
Now, if I could only convince everyone that the peacocks actually existed, I might be able to confirm my sanity.
Open windows in a psych unit?
ReplyDeletePsych unit? where do you think I work....that's the TB ward, the psych unit is anywhere a psych patient happens to be
ReplyDeleteOpen windows in a TB ward? (Or is that sarcasm? Difficult to tell...)
ReplyDelete