Over the past week, the Rice 360 interns and I have been getting ready for our respective trips. In preparation, we have been training in various topics from ethics and respect to working with communities and assessing our value-based goals. We have also been learning more about our cohort and the diverse skills and motivations each person brings to their project.

In a week, I will be heading to Tanzania with Ojas and Shrutika! The three of us are working on interdisciplinary projects. The project I am working on is an analysis of the capacity of biomedical workshops in health facilities to maintain and repair medical equipment in Malawi, Kenya, Tanzania, and Nigeria. While in Tanzania, I will have the opportunity to visit these facilities and talk to the employees in the workshops to better understand their experience and inform my analysis. In Houston, I have been reading WHO guidelines for the assessing, procuring, and decommissioning medical devices in low to middle income countries (LMICs) to gain some perspective on the challenges they face and how they are advised to address it. I have also searched through the literature to gain a sense of the situation that most LMICs face regarding broken equipment and experience using the equipment they receive. Additionally, since this my first time analyzing a large dataset, I have been looking through the methodologies of some research papers to inform my own methods in this project.

Before working on this project, I had not considered that equipment maintenance could serve such a vital role in the hospital. As someone who is interested in the medical field, my conceptions around patient care have focused on the practice of medicine and the inclusion of social determinants of health into that criteria as a means to treat health. At a more fundamental level, the availability of resources and the built environment can become a barrier just as strong as any other. I hope that through my projects and those of my peers, I will gain a better understanding of the complex factors that contribute to patient care, remain humble in my own experiences of care, and be open to the experiences and knowledge of the people in Tanzania I have come to learn with.

One more week before we head out to Tanzania!

Feeling excited and contemplative,

Annika