CMSA Accreditations: None
Rural Allowance: Yes
Doctors Quarters:
- No comments yet.
Academics:
- There was an initiative by the Internal Medicine department at Cecilia Makiwane Hospital to have weekly zoom tutorials to cover topics that are relevant for district hospitals. This included topics from Emergency Medicine, Internal Medicine and some maternity cases. The hospital itself runs no academic programmes. Most learning you do on your own.
Supervision:
- As a Community Service MO, you work like all the other MOs. There is no supervision but there is always help when you need it from fellow colleagues. You run a ward with a Clinical Associate or one other MO when you’re fully staffed. You do calls on your own with a second on call to help you if the call gets busy.
Clinical Exposure:
- Like every other town in South Africa, there is a wide range of pathology to see and manage. You are a district doctor and therefore will see all patients from neonate to geriatric and they will present with very undifferentiated presentations. The only surgeries done here are caeserean sections, bilateral tubal ligation and Circumcisions.
Departments worked in:
- Internal Medicine, Surgery, Orthopaedics, Paediatrics, Obstetrics & Gynaecology, Anaesthetics, Psychiatry, ARV clinic, Emergency Department, OPD’s - There are 5 wards and casualty plus opd. Maternity ward is run by one MO, includes morning rounds and running high risk Antenatal clinic during the afternoon. Whenever there is a C/s, someone else comes to do the spinal anaesthetic. Female ward has medical, psych, surgical and gynae (non pregnant) patients, also run by an MO. Male ward has medical, surgical and psych patalso run by an MO. Paeds ward has any child <13 yo admitted, undifferentiated. With the pandemic there’s also a PUI and COVID isolation ward that are run by an MO, everyone rotates weekly and you’ll run the ward atleast once in 2 months.
Social Scene:
- There is nothing social about the hospital and town except for the staff/colleagues.
Additional Comments:
- The hospital is not busy at all, calls are capped at 80 hours and anything beyond is voluntary and paid for. The nursing staff are amazing, they assist you with a lot (within their true scope of practice). Each month you work 2 Weekday calls and 2 weekend calls. There are trainings outside the hospital that one can attend to improve or learn new skills. One can use their time to write other exams like primaries and do courses like ACLS, ATLS, BLS, PALS etc.
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