FAMILY AND COMMUNITY MEDICINE

FAMILY AND COMMUNITY MEDICINE

               

                “The aim of medicine is to prevent disease and to prolong life, the ideal of medicine is to eliminate the need of a physician”.                                                      - William James Mayo

                They say that community medicine is one of the easiest rotation in clerkship since you will be in the community for almost 3 weeks and will have rest. I might say they were right. During our first day in community medicine, they orient us about the rules and regulations of the department. In our 6 weeks rotation, we will have 1 week of lectures, 3 weeks of community immersion, 1 week OPD rotation and 1 week TB dots rotation. My group were assigned to Brgy. Pantihan 4, the largest community handled by La Salle. During our first week, we were given lectures regarding vital registration, hypertension, diabetes mellitus, pneumonia, IMCI, animal bites and other common community disease that we may possible encounter in the community or in the hospital. We also had courtesy call in our designated community and saw the houses that was assigned to us. I am assigned to Nanay Puring’s house with four of my groupmates.

                During our second week of rotation, the whole group went to each community assignment. Since we were new in the place, we toured ourselves in the community and had courtesy call with the barangay officials and to our foster parents. Our barangay was composed of 12 catchments or puroks. We were far from the houses of other groups and our house was in the middle of a farm. It is about 15 to 20 minutes’ walk before we can reach the house of our other roommates. Our foster parent was living in the neighborhood and we were the only one occupying the house. During the first week, we performed the tasks that was not finished by the previous rotators. We finished reporting to the 4 catchments that they didn’t finished. We also started to make our paper in the community. However, most of the time were allotted to talking, cooking, eating and sleeping.

                During our third week, we were assigned to TB Dots department of the hospital. I thought that it was just a small place beneath Angelo King building but when I entered inside the facility, it was big inside. During our 1 week rotation in TB dots, we were assigned to different areas. The TB positive patients, the TB negative patients and TB screening area. During first day, I was assigned to TB screening area where we were performing mantoux test to patients. After rotating in TB screening area, we were assigned to TB positive patients. In here, we were interviewing patients for geneXpert exam wherein they were cases of relapse, treatment after failure and TB recurrence. Also, we were giving health educations on each patients on how to prevent transmission of tuberculosis and the importance of daily treatment. We were also performing intramuscular injections of kanamycin, capreomycin or streptomycin to the patients. In TB negative patients, we were administering a directly observed treatment on each patients wherein we were giving them the drugs that they will take in from of us. Some of them vomit, and in some of them you will see the side effects of each medications. You will see the hardships that they experience to fight tuberculosis. During the afternoon, we have lectures on tuberculosis, it causes, transmission, symptoms, management, and prevention.

                During our fourth week, we returned back to the community. There was 8 patients who were enrolled in our community program and we need to visit them twice a week to monitor their conditions. Most of them were cases of hypertension and stroke. Since we are far from their houses, we usually allot 1 hour of walk to visit them. Most of the days in the community were allotted in visiting the patient and finishing our outputs.

                During our fifth week, we were assigned in OPD. Family medicine where the first line of doctor who check the patients before referring to other department. Most of the cases we handled were hypertension, diabetes mellitus, asthma and pneumonia. It was fun to rotate in the OPD department as the residents were treating the patient holistically and not only giving medications.  They were health educating the patient about the disease. On our last week we were not immersed to the community due to NPA threats. We just finished our reports, outputs and written exams.