Tanzania Week 6

My "office"
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I guess I can sum up Monday through Friday in a sentence or two. I didn't really do much. I surfed the web at work, studied football, studied some Swahili vocab, facebook-stalked people... I'm still waiting for approval on my project but since it looks like its going to go through I'll tell you a little about it.

As part of an upcoming study on a malaria vaccine the health institute has proposed using PDAs to collect data for a passive case detection system. My job is to monitor the collection by the current paper-based system via direct observation and then compare it to the new PDA-based system. We're looking to see that it reduces logic errors, data entry errors and personnel time. I'll also be measuring quality of care to make sure that it doesn't suffer by switching to the new system. For those of you who talked to me before I left you might notice that this is really different than the project that was conceptualized before I left the US... hakuna matata (side note - they don't really say that here, it's only for tourists; here they say hakuna shidar or shida I'm not sure exactly how it's written). Hopefully at the end we can write up a short paper about it. Not sure how interesting it will be but hopefully it can at least get published!  It will also be interesting for me to see what health care is like at the smaller clinics associated with the hospital.  All in all the project should take 1 month to complete. It involves 2 phases of 10 observation days each. If you have any other questions I'd be happy to go into more detail but I don't want to bore you :)