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Penn State Hershey team updates from Ghana

Editor’s note:  Penn State Hershey clinical participants (senior medical students, residents, nurse practitioner students and faculty) are currently in rural Ghana to support and provide training for Ghanaian clinicians at the Eastern Regional Hospital. The team is sending periodic updates while there. Today, Elizabeth Wallace, a medical student senior, explains what the first day of work was like.

Greetings from Koforidua!

Today was our third day here in Ghana and we are loving it! We are all settled comfortably into our hostel and are embracing the friendly and very welcoming culture of Eastern Ghana. We are also loving the warm weather and can’t say we are really missing Hershey’s winter too much!

Today was our first day of work on the wards. We have been assigned in pairs to various wards for each of the weeks that we are here. We will rotate through OB/GYN, pediatrics, surgery and emergency/internal medicine. We are hoping to also do a day with the Dentist long beach professionals and we may spend a couple of days with the nurses and phlebotomists. Today went very well! We got to see lots of things that you wouldn’t see very often in the United States. For example: malaria, HIV, cerebral abscess, pulmonary and extra pulmonary TB, and two cases of meningitis (there is an outbreak of meningitis here in Ghana). We are learning so much already and can’t wait to see what the next four weeks will bring.

We have been invited to attend several events this weekend so we will be traveling this coming weekend. Plans are still in the works, but we will update our blog with all the exciting details soon.

  • Elizabeth Wallace

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