Each Friday for the next three weeks, the Tanzania EWH team will work at Mount Meru Hospital just outside the heart of Arusha.
The Tanzanian health care system consists of larger referral/consultant hospitals such as Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Center, regional referral centers covering several districts, and smaller hospitals covering one district each such as Karatu Hospital.
Mount Meru is a regional hospital with departments for obstetrics and gynecology, pediatrics, surgery, out-patients, and units for ophthalmology and dentistry. The hospital also has a laboratory and an intensive care unit. The hospital typically sees 500 patients per day on an outpatient basis and admits approximately 250-290 patients every day.
Generally there is a fee to be seen by a doctor at Mount Meru; however, as a public hospital, they are obliged to serve all people, and will provide free health care to those who cannot afford it.
The typical population served by the hospital consists of farmers, pastoralists or industry workers. These are families that earn a low to middle-class income. Some of those who work in the outskirts of the districts covered by Mount Meru Hospital (for example people coming from Ngorongoro or Longido district) have nine hours travelling time to the hospital. Others simply can’t afford the cost of transportation. As a result, acute patients, especially pregnant women and children, often reach the hospital too late for doctors to do anything.
According to hospital staff, the largest barriers to provide health care services in Tanzania are lack of capacity to handle all, but especially acute patients, lack of funding and lack of accessibility to medicines, supplies and health care technologies. These issues are more or less apparent in all across governmental Tanzanian hospitals from the district level up to referral/consultant levels. Handling acute cases is a particularly large problem at district hospitals, which is why regional hospitals like Mount Meru experience a very high occupancy rate and a high number of patients, that do not reach the hospital in time for an ideal outcome of their treatment.
At Mount Meru Hospital, one challenge in meeting the demand is the large amount of donated equipment of which only about half is currently functioning. The entire region has just one biomedical engineering technician (BMET), Mr. Sharif Rajabu Kishakali. As of early 2015, he is the first ever BMET at Mt. Meru Hospital. He is currently working on a preventative maintenance program for the hospital’s equipment. The attached pictures are a collection from the projects he is currently working on.
