Tired from the night before, we hopped on the minibus to the orphanage which was to become our base in Karbala.
We set up A World Without Barriers’ medical clinic at the Al Sadiq (a.s) orphanage set up by the Qazwini family. We stuck to our teams of doctor, pharmacist and translator. The difference for our team was that we had Ahmed as our translator who is also a dentist. This turned out to be quite successful in seeing as many patients as we could, and screening them for medical and dental.
Quickly we realised that there were some medications that we did not have enough of and that if we were to be here for the next few days we would require a Pharmacy run. Shortly into the shift I went to visit the local Pharmacy which was an eye opening experience. The Pharmacy was very well equipped with many essential medications like antibiotics and painkillers. However despite having a translator it was still difficult to explain some of what we wanted, even when giving the generic names.
We realised that any specialised equipment or medication such as urine dipsticks, 5 ml spoons or fluoride toothpaste would not be found there. In the future these items may have to be brought here from home. Locating creams turned out to be a very difficult task! In the end the pharmacist let us through to his dispensary to find items we may need which made things much easier! We were able to locate antibiotic creams, anti-fungal creams and even acne creams. The one obstacle I found was the lack of emollient creams which is surprising since we have seen so many cases of patients suffering from dry skin conditions, probably due to the hot weather. After a while we were finally able to locate a few tubes of moisturising creams which weren’t as strong as what we would find back home, but paraffin based, and at least would help somewhat. In the future we definitely need to make sure enough emollients are sent over from the UK, as the creams may have to be used on a regular basis or long term. With our hands full of medicine treasure we headed off back to the orphanage.
The doctors had finished with their patients and were now doubling up as dental nurses! We put the medications aside and broke the news about the shortage of moisturisers to the doctors, but luckily the few tubes we had kept us going.
By Zainab W
April 2016
