I will be traveling to Botswana in April of 2025 through my residency program at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) in Boston. BIDMC has built a strong partnership with the academic Scottish Livingston Hospital in Molepolole, Botswana, sending residents and fellows to the site each year since 2011. As fellows in the program, we work in the hospital serving the local community with an overall focus on direct care provision to patients admitted to the hospital and education for the medical students/residents training at the Scottish Livingston Hospital. In addition, we have a longitudinal project that each resident traveling to Botswana from BIDMC completes related to quality improvement, program evaluation or clinical research that has aims to enhance the care and/or training provided at Scottish Livingston. I aim to focus my project on cancer screenings to patients in Molepolole. I hope to create a seamless intake system on age-appropriate cancer screenings for patients who come through the hospital so that patients and their community providers can track local populations in need of screening services. The overall goal of the initiative would be to create an improved system's connection between the inpatient and outpatient providers whilst improving care navigation for patients. Additionally, this system would also provide useful education to medical students/residents to routinely consider the importance of cancer screenings in the populations they care for after direct hospital admission.
This opportunity offered through BIDMC offers ways to impact multiple communities in Molepolole including both patients and providers during the month-long residence.
Generally, our role there as senior residents is to provide education to medical students and residents working at Scottish Livingston while providing direct care to patients admitted to the medicine service at the hospital.
Specific to my project of interest, I am focused on improving the Scottish Livingston's workflow to ensure patients coming through the hospital have cancer screening gaps identified and addressed in the community after discharge. The goal would be to improve the care system in Molepolole to provide a smoother transfer for patients transitioning from the inpatient to the outpatient environment with regards to cancer screenings. As an added benefit, this system would also provide helpful spaced repetition for students/residents in training at Scottish Livingston to solidify important cancer screening guidelines relevant to patient age, sex and exposure history.
My hope with this project is to create a simple and seamless adjunct to the hospital discharge workflow such that patient cancer screenings are monitored by inpatient teams and provided on transitional care paperwork. The goal would be to improve the Molepolole local health network such that patients can better navigate their care needs to remain up to date on age appropriate cancer screenings.
Worked at the Scottish Livingston Hospital in Molepolole in Botswana educating interns in training to become medical officers on the medicine wards and in their ICU. Working with patient struggling with TB and uncontrolled HIV in a health system grappling with global aid funding cuts.
