Neonatology!

(by Jenn Harling)

Hey Everyone!

I'll re-introduce myself as I still consider myself one of the "newer" team members... but in all acutality we've been here since January 2020!  I'm Jenn Harling, married to the ever-so-talented Michael Harling (surgeon / IT extrodinaire / internet guru / biomed guy / fixer of all the things our children break) and mom to Amelia, Madelyn, and Mark.  I'm a pediatrician but I like to call myself a self-trained budding neonatologist. I love all the children of Kibuye and really enjoy treating all of them, but there's something about those newborns that gets me!  While Alyssa is here, I focus mostly in Neo, but while she's gone I cover all of peds.  And I also love love love teaching... but that's for another blog.  Since our return from home assignment in July 2022, I've been working to improve the quality of care given in the Neo unit with small changes here and there. I attended a Neonatology conference in Tanzania in October 2022 and lerned so much and am excited to hopefully implement a lot of what I learned over the years to come.  

Our unit in the new Peds building (if you want more on that, you can see one of Alyssa's old posts about the opening of the peds building... actually there are TWO posts... here's the other one) is on the top floor and can hold about 40 babies.  One thing I think is really neat and possibly unique is taht the mothers get to have a bed on our unit as well.  You can see in the video that the "incubators" are attached to the end of a patient bed. The mothers stay in the bed and are the major caregivers to their babies. This is necessary as sometimes we have very high ratios of patients to nurses. 

Recent changes include a hand hygeine initiative, using a white board to track patients, keeping nurses in the unit rather than having them rotate to different services, and re-vamping some of our protocols.

Rather than ramble on and on, I thought I'd just give you a tour in person!  Hope you enjoy the petit tour. 

(Also, this is my first time uploading ... ahem... trying to upload a video so let me know if it doesn't work and I'll ask my husband for advice 😂)