Onboard and hard at work!

We are on the USNS Mercy! We were actually onboard a few days ago, but our internet access has just started working. All of our travelling went very smoothly until we got to Qui Nhon. We were supposed to be onboard on Monday afternoon, but we were caught up in some logistics with the Vietnamese government. They wanted to approve each and every person that got on the Mercy while it was docked in Vietnam. So we stayed in a hotel in Qui Nhon until our clearance papers came through. We were allowed on board on Tuesday, and it took pretty much all day to get oriented and unpacked. We got assigned to our “racks,” which is our beds. And they showed us where the “heads” were, which is the bathrooms. It is tough trying to get used to all of the military lingo, but I am catching on. On Wednesday, we met the pharmacy staff and had orientation to the pharmacy all day. We don’t have clearance for the computer system yet, so we can only really perform filling and prepacking responsibilities right now. The pharmacy team is like a family, and we get a lot of work done and have a lot of fun while doing it. On Thursday, I went to the MEDCAP site in Nhon Binh. The MEDCAPs are clinic sites that we set up in different places around Qui Nhon. The people get checked in at Patient Admissions and get their vital signs checked, and then they are sent to see either a physician, a dentist, or an optometrist. If a prescription is written, they are sent to the pharmacy and we fill and dispense the medicine that they need. The MEDCAP is at a school, so the pharmacy is a classroom, and we move the desks around to form a pharmacy and direct patient flow. All of the medications are prepacked in plastic Ziplock bags and stored in brown paper bags with the drug name and quantity. We set out the brown paper bags in alphabetical order so that when we get a prescription all we have to do is find the bag, grab a ziplock, and stick the label to it. The hard part though, is finding the patient that the drug belongs to. All of the patients are coded with a barcode and number, so we have to match the number on the drug to the patient. This is easier said than done when you have 50 people who speak a different language all crowded into a tiny classroom. We accomplished this task as quickly as we could, and dispensed the medications. The pharmacist at this MEDCAP could speak Vietnamese, which was very convenient. She counseled each patient and then discharged them when she was finished. It was a very long day, but it was very rewarding to see all of the people that we helped. Many of them have no access to medical care, and to be able to provide free care and free medication is amazing.