Back to Yatzaputzan
Having returned to Quito with María Alicia on Thursday, we made out second visit to Yatzaputzan early Friday morning. This time, rather than working with the women’s cooperative, we were able to meet with the staff at the clinic in order to get feedback on the technologies we brought with us.
Though Amanda’s AccuDose syringe clips have not arrived yet (fingers crossed that they’ll be ready soon!) she had the opportunity to discuss the design with the “promotores de salud,” Fundación Futuro’s version of community health outreach workers. Overall, the staff seemed very excited about the idea and certainly thought that the clips would help prevent overdosing. They use 5 mL syringes and doses range from 1.5 mL to 3.5 mL, so we are hoping that the clips that are currently being made at Rice will be compatible.
We also reviewed the CHO pack with the promotores, who gave us great feedback on the design. They told us that they do use everything currently in the pack, but they also requested an adult scale, thermometer (ours broke) and a pediatric blood pressure cuff (which we were unable to find in time for our trip). Also, one of the main responsibilities of the promotores is health education in the community, so they liked our idea of including educational materials such as flipbooks and diagrams related to hygiene, family planning, vaccinations and nutrition in the backpack, something we’ll be working on developing this week.
Finally, we demonstrated Sally, the salad spinner centrifuge, to the promotores. Again, they were disappointed that it required 10 minutes of spinning, but expressed that it would be useful in their clinic, which occasionally loses power. Their apparent favorite aspect of the design was the reader cards. Anemic hematocrit levels depend on age and gender (i.e. hematocrit of 38 is healthy for women but not men), so Lauren and I designed a set of reader cards (seen above) to accompany Sally that indicate anemia levels directly on the chart, making it eaiser to diagnose the condition. With these reader cards, they would be able to test for anemia without the lab technician who visits only once a week. While we’re working in Quito this week, we hope to make a similar set of reader cards for ZIPocrit so that they can screen for anemia more frequently.