Kudjip, Papua New Guinea: Dr. Erin Meier, missionary doctor at Kudjip Nazarene Hospital, brings this insight to medical missions and improvisation!

We run out of things and make substitutions daily here at Kudjip. Whether it is a medicine, an IV fluid, a laboratory test, gauze, gloves, even no water – we are constantly figuring out how to make do with what we have.

Dr. Bill looking at an X-ray

Recently, the shortages have carried over to X-ray chemicals. Taking an X-ray requires not only someone who knows how to position the patient for the X-ray, but a machine that can take the X-ray, film to put the X-ray on, and chemicals to develop the X-ray. If any one of these pieces are missing, X-ray doesn’t happen.

We were down to our last bottle of developing chemicals and weren’t sure when the next bottle would come. A bottle usually lasts us 4 days at our normal rate of ordering X-rays.

Tibia fracture as shown on X-ray

So, knowing that we were running low, we have been trying to limit the number of x-rays that we are doing. Trying to treat the things we can treat without actually getting the X-ray. If someone has a cough, instead of getting an X-ray to see if they have pneumonia, we make a clinical decision and treat accordingly. Instead of doing an X-ray to see if they have fluid in their lung in pulmonary tuberculosis, I have taken them to the ultrasound room and done an ultrasound in place of a traditional X-ray.

Using an ultrasound to diagnose fractures

The ultrasound has also become helpful in orthopedic cases. You can see bones quite nicely on ultrasound and in this shortage of X-rays, we have taken to using the ultrasound to try and determine if there is a fracture or not. If there is one, the ultrasound can help us determine if it is aligned correctly or not and then after trying to straighten the bones, we can look again to see if we got the bones in the right position or not. It isn’t perfect, but without X-ray, it is a great option. We recently got a few bottles of chemicals, so we have been able to test our ultrasound methods and found that we did a pretty good job even without X-ray.

(Submitted by Dr. Erin Meier – Kudjip Nazarene Hospital)

Thank you for your continued prayers for the team at Kudjip Nazarene Hospital, as they continue to be the tangible hands and feet of Christ to those in need.

Even when commodities are in short supply…God’s grace is sufficient!