Day 17

A very nice 10 am arrival time, doing some data analysis of the results from training, and complimenting Mayowa on the sunglasses he was wearing to help his conjunctivitis. Haleigh is aware that’s not a complete sentence but just deal with it.

Anyways, we set out to our day of driving and meetings with Paschall, the first of which with the medical director of the Lagos state accident and emergency center, the only hospital in Lagos solely dedicated to trauma victims. They also provide all their services completely free and thus can provide as much intervention as needed to help the patient, unlike other hospitals here that can only provide what the patient can pay for. He gave us the shocking statistic about a trimodal model of injury where 50% of people that will die from trauma so do within the first 1-3 minutes, 30% die within the next hour, and the last 20% die later on. This hospital’s goal is to save that last 50% and they’re excited to collaborate with us on helping that first 50%. The medical director was also interested in our online curriculum efforts. He told us a story from his medical training in the early 2000s about a patient that had been referred from at least six different hospitals, and while their protocol was refer him again, the patient would have almost definitely died on the 4 hour drive to the next hospital and needed a splenectomy. The doctor had only assisted in one before, with no intention of performing the procedure, but spent time watching and rewatching recorded videos of splenectomies to be confident and ended up saving the patient’s life. After this, he started an online software that consolidated videos for medical training, but struggled to obtain copyright privileges and when trying to film the videos himself, ran into issues with patient consent. Nonetheless, he was very supportive of online initiatives and in grad school had studied patients seen by both telemedicine and in-person doctors, and the only difference in care was those with telemedicine had shorter hospital stays, which was a cool statistic!

After this meeting, we were going to interview one of the doctors, but he had multiple emergencies to attend to. Luckily there was a triage nurse there that Mary discussed our questions with, but we had to cut the interview short to make it in time to our next meeting all the way on the island. Impact Hub is a global organization committed to connecting entrepreneurs, innovators and investors to build a more just and sustainable society (yes that description was taken from their website). We were able to meet with the special advisor to the Lagos governor on sustainable development goals, or SDGs. She was super accomplished with multiple higher education degrees and consulting and government work, but was also one of the nicest and friendliest people we’ve met here so far, and genuinely interested in our shared mission with HEI.

On the way back to Surulere, we actually saw a car hit a motorcycle driver, but he was ok and just the motorcycle fell down, and also crossed the largest bridge in West Africa, the Third Mainland Bridge, which is 7.3 miles long! By 3 pm, upon hearing Aayush did not eat any breakfast, Paschall was insistent we eat something and graciously treated us to snacks from a local supermarket. Haleigh got some ground nuts, almonds, sesame cookie things and delicious coconut chips. Mary got some pringles and oroes, while Aayush got plantain chips and cheez-it’s

We went back to the office to do some more work. Aayush interviewed some of our partners for our data records and then he and Mary called past responders asking them to fill out the psychosocial survey that we would text. Haleigh finished up the data analysis for preliminary results of the trainings and if you’re interested it’s the paragraph below but the blog is already quite boring today so please pretend it’s not there if you’re not.

Participants in the in-person group scored medians of 34.78% (IQR: 26.1%,43.5%) and 52.17% (IQR: 39.1%, 71.7%) on the pre-/post-tests respectively, for a median improvement of 17.39% (p<0.001). Participants in the online group scored medians of 34.78% (IQR: 26.1%,47.8%) and 60.87% (IQR: 43.5%, 69.6%) on the pre-/post-tests respectively, for a median improvement of 26.09% (p<0.001). For the airway simulation, the in-person group scored a median of 87.5% (IQR: 75.0%,87.5%) and the online group scored a median of 75.0% (IQR: 62.5%,90.6%) (p=0.275). For the bleeding/fracture simulation, the in-person group scored a median of 83.3% (IQR: 75.0%,91.7%) and the online group scored a median of 83.3% (IQR: 62.5%,91.7%) (p=0.344).

We left for the day and got back to the hotel, only for Aayush to request his supermarket Cheeze-it’s and Haleigh had to break it to him that she forgot them at the office. He nicely went back to get them while Haleigh went to an atm to withdraw money to pay our hotel food bill, oops. But all three ATMs she tried declined her card, which was unfortunate. But it’s fascinating how close and frequent atms are here, like there were at least five within a few minutes walk/visible distance.

Mary got KFC again for dinner but Haleigh and Aayush had the crisis of whether to eat when we got back or later at night, because we were hungry now but we also won’t eat until like 3 pm tomorrow at training so we would want to have a later dinner tonight. We decided on a snack now and dinner later to satisfy Haleigh’s craving for the pasta “bolognaise” and another shoutout to Aayush for happily doing the responder interviews when Haleigh shoves her phone in his face because they understand him better, we got two more done tonight.

Haleigh best Aayush by a whopping one second today on the crossword: 8-6

The facial expressions in this picture are… something else. I promise we tried to smile for it

There was a fancy Microsoft headquarters in this part of Lagos - we’re hoping to have a meeting with them on Thursday

This Impact Hub was super nice, and we learned google offered to design it for them (the only non-google office space they’ve designed not in Palo Alto)

We also loved this greenery Africa decoration!

We took pictures all around this office tbh

~girl dinner~