Day 6

Sorry for the delayed blog post, we were exhausted after our day yesterday and didn’t have wifi until now to add the pictures anyways. Haleigh may or may not be writing the majority of this on the way to our trainings today…

The only shenanigans that happened last night were day 3 of a cold shower, so that’s good. Aayush again did not enter his breakfast era, but he did beat Haleigh on the mini crossword, 0:47 to 1:34 (Haleigh was interrupted in the middle to do something she’d like to add so shave a few seconds off), and he finally overcame his hatred of beta games to play nyt connections. AND he went so far as to go through the archives to play two weeks of the game.

We have our first training today. For those of you who don’t know, our program implements a 5 hour course in basic trauma care, with topics of scene safety, airway, breathing and circulation, bleeding control, fracture splinting, managing multiple victims, and victim transport. There are lecture components but a lot of the course is hands-on practical sessions.

Recently, we have developed an online version of our curriculum in a series of 10 videos on the same topics. Disseminating an online curriculum would make our program much easier to scale because of costs and personnel required for in-person training. Of course, we need to see if the online curriculum works though! So we are running a study where half the participants are trained with the in-person class taught by an instructor and half are trained by the online videos. We then compare their performance on our pre and post tests, as well as a simulation presented to the individual participant, on either airway management or bleeding control/fracture splinting. We are also conducting this study with our partners in Sierra Leone, Uganda, and Kenya, and our first results form Sierra Leone showed the online training participants performed just as well as the in-person, which is great to see and we hope to replicate those results in Nigeria!

We did trainings in the Yaba market today, which was quite busy and chaotic once it opened at 9 am. With a little waiting around while Chika looked for the venue, Aayush offered to donate our partner Mary a foot of his height and tried to convince her to teach her future children Hindi. Everyone kept asking us if we were stressed and we were like no do we look stressed?

We got to the venue at around 9:15, and began setting up one room for the video trainings and one for the in-person. Haleigh had reminded them to download the videos, and couldn’t on her laptop before because of wifi, but they had not and so we spent an hour and a half trying to download them on the hotspots, which said it would take over four hours for a 10 minute video. Haleigh also realized there was a miscommunication on performing the simulation assessments at the end, so needed to quickly make google forms for those on her limited service and wifi, however google forms doesn’t work without wifi so she then made them on another platform that works offline. It didn’t really end up mattering but we’ll get there. After everyone had arrived and been waiting for an hour, we told them to give up on the videos, and that we’d just assign everyone to in-person training for today.

They had google forms for our pre post test that were printed as QR codes on a poster. While most people here have smartphones, the camera doesn’t have a scanning feature and only about half of them had scanning apps. We had to help most of them scan and connect to the hotspots, however only a certain number of people could be on the hotspot at a time, so when the first people finished the test they had to disconnect so more people could join. And had to text the link to anyone that couldn’t scan it. Needless to say it was quite chaotic and took over an hour to complete the pre-tests. Also some of the trainees didn’t speak English and had trouble filling out the demographic questions and understanding the test questions, and we didn’t have enough people to help all of them, so not everyone was able to complete the pre-test, or just filled out random answers on the test.

After this debacle, we started the course, which ran pretty smoothly (except for the projector screen that kept falling, the power going out at one point, and a large portion of the class leaving in the middle to pray) being led by Dr. Popoola, one of our awesome trainers. It’s always nice to see participants eager to learn and practice their skills. Aayush did a great job presenting a small part of the course! For the most part we let the local trainers do it, because trainees understand them better and we want to guarantee program sustainability. Haleigh, needing to organize her way through everything, worked on a document with details to send to the trainers with QR codes, links, and descriptions for each step of the training.

We each had a bar for breakfast around 9, but probably looked quite sapped of energy and hungry by like 2:30, so our partners let us eat our lunch early. Unfortunately, it was interrupted by needing to help with breakout sessions and documenting responder id numbers, but the few bites of rice we got were nice.

The post-test had the same problems as the pre-test with hotspot connections and qr codes, but we managed, and also gave out our devices for people to complete it on. When people were done with the post test, our plan was to send them to Haleigh to do the simulation assessment. While they were waiting in line, they would do a psychosocial survey we have, that asks questions establishing a responder’s support system, level of altruism, and mental health. With feedback from last year, we had cut the number of questions in half and simplified the language. Haleigh acted as a simulated patient for the first two participants before a large line formed and everyone got impatient. Aayush stopped trying to get them to fill out the psychosocial survey and was going to take half the participants to do the simulations. Haleigh got one more person done before everyone started crowding around telling her it was ridiculous we had to do this because they already practiced and knew how to do it, and everybody was just going to leave. Despite their concern earlier today, Haleigh was now quite stressed and nobody was listening to her. She tried to see if even a small group of people would stay but nobody would. So she gave up and they started handing out first aid kits, vests, and certificates. We should only hand out these materials to people who completed the pre and post test, and ideally the simulation assessment, however it was chaotic to check every single person so if they were there for most of the course we ended up giving it out. And Haleigh was pulled away for 20 minutes to take pictures with each participant as she was trying not to cry, so fun times. Aayush gave a brief interview to our photographer, along with some other responders, and by a little after 5 pm we had finished. Haleigh also had to find her missing phone she had given to a trainee for the post test at one point.

We’re sympathetic to the lower education levels of trainees and lost wages due to spending the day in our course. We debriefed with Chika and Dr. Popoola to come up with a better plan for tomorrow that was best for the trainee’s so we will let you know how that turns out. Sorry for the unfun blog today but research in the field can be hard and tiring. And the first day of training is always the hardest with kinks to work out.

Small win of the day for Haleigh: when we got back to the hotel, the manager was confused on how we had been paying for all the food we had eaten. Haleigh explained we thought they were charging it to our room and just knew our room number because nobody had asked us to pay or for our number. They said this was not the case and would be giving us a budget of what we had to pay, so, much to everyone’s surprise, Aayush turned out to be wrong.

In other news, Haleigh has discovered if you eat peanut butter after eating a bite of spicy food, it neutralizes the taste slightly. And we had a drug deal outside our hotel rooms earlier when Aayush agreed to take melatonin so he can go to bed before 4 am today.

Despite it being taller than the width and length of the car, this box was actually not that difficult to fit in our uber

The Yaba market opening for the day!

A nice picture with Chika! Haleigh promises her shirt was clean this morning and only got dirt all over it by carrying the projector to our trainings.

We think Aayush can afford to lose a few inches of height

Aayush and Dr. Popoola trying to figure out the video system

Paschall made an appearance to introduce himself and HEI!

Aayush not realizing he’s presenting on a blank screen because the projector had turned off… he did great though!

Aayush signing an autograph for his fans

Unsure how to eat chicken with a spoon

Haleigh’s mom sent her this today and she thought it very much encapsulated the vibe of our day

Poor Aayush has been delegated to carrying every heavy thing, Haleigh finally helped him after a minute into the walk he asked if we still had the five minutes left of the walk back to the car