A trip to Uganda sheds light on Spectrum’s worldwide mission to provide equitable care. With a shared commitment to improve the health of all populations in our global community, pathologist Emily Meserve, MD, MPH, and anesthesiologist Jonathan Meserve, MD, packed up their kids and headed to Mbarara Regional Referral Hospital.
As managing director of Spectrum pathology, Dr. Emily Meserve has long been an advocate for collaborative approaches to patient care. Dr. Jonathan Meserve’s training includes a specialty in pediatric anesthesiology.
As a government-funded public hospital, Mbarara Hospital does not have the resources it needs to care for its patients despite being the second largest teaching hospital in the country. Unreliable access to equipment, technology, medical specialists, sterilization capabilities, and medicine is jarring compared to our practices in the U.S.
“For us, the most important thing was not to arrive, perform surgery, and leave,” says Dr. Jonathan Meserve. “We focused our visit on understanding and adding what we could to the existing resources in our respective specialties and the training of their exceptional residents.”
Mbarara Hospital serves as the teaching hospital for the Mbarara University of Science and Technology, as well as for nursing students from Bishop Stuart University. It is staffed by medical students and residents, who serve a population of over four million people.
Patient Care Challenges
“Realistically, we would do about half of the scheduled surgical cases every day, and then we would run out of supplies, and everyone else would get canceled,” says Dr. Jonathan Meserve.
He also notes other obstacles this community faces. With a lack of proper sanitation and supplies, the maternal death rate is high, as is the operative complication rate for fairly routine cases. Patients in Uganda also need to supply their own medications, even to have surgery, and total cost is often prohibitive. For many, any care is too expensive.
Dr. Emily Meserve has a standout memory that also speaks to the unique challenges that healthcare providers in Uganda face. “A woman with a neck mass needed a biopsy. She was from Burundi and was visiting family in Uganda. There are over sixty-five languages spoken in Uganda, and Burundi has its own additional layers of language complexity.
“It took five people from the lab to connect the language dots between the patient and the resident performing the procedure,” she recalls. “I was anxious something would get miscommunicated in this game of telephone, but thanks to this true team approach, she got the care she needed.”
Dr. Emily Meserve also adds that there are no electronic records. Each patient’s physically portable health records are written in many languages by various providers. “It’s a real challenge to accomplish basic tasks when you can’t even guarantee you will speak close to the same language as the person walking in the door.”
A Special Place with More Work to Do
Looking back on their month in Uganda, Dr. Emily Meserve and Dr. Jonathan Meserve say they learned more than they taught. Dr. Emily Meserve says there were many notes she brought back, citing impressive work across triage, workflow choices, and tissue control blocks the team here in Maine can apply in the lab.
The conversations did not stop when they got back on Maine soil. “We are on Zoom together from across the globe,” says Dr. Jonathan Meserve. “It’s an early morning for me and a late afternoon for them, but we make it work.”
A Commitment to Healthcare Worldwide
At Spectrum Healthcare Partners, we are committed to improving the health of those beyond our immediate borders. The Meserves’ trip to Uganda is only one of our most recent examples of international outreach and collaboration.
In fact, for the past nine years we have worked with Tenwek Hospital, a faith-based, missionary hospital in Kenya that provides healthcare options for the local people in that community. Spectrum anesthesiology managing director Nancy R. Boulanger, MD, first learned about the program through a physician colleague at Maine Medical Center. Since 2014, she has visited Tenwek Hospital five times, taking residents with her for many of those visits.
In 2022 Spectrum also provided a monetary gift to the hospital to underwrite the purchase of a new anesthesia machine. This equipment upgrade enables the medical team at Tenwek to provide safe and precise delivery of anesthesia to even the smallest of infants.
Thanks to the volunteer work of many of our physicians, and our organizational mission to give back to our communities, we continue to work on supporting equitable access to healthcare to our neighbors — both those nearby and those across the globe.
