DURHAM North Carolina
A neurosurgeon at an elite U.S. university has gathered several tons of medical equipment, some of which sat unused at the school’s medical facility, and is planning on donating it to a Ugandan hospital.
Dr. Michael Haglund, who works at Duke University Medical Center, decided to donate the equipment and supplies after he returned from a trip to a hospital in the Ugandan capital earlier this year where he found the facility woefully under-equipped.
On Saturday, he and a team from the private university will deliver more than nine tons of medical equipment and supplies worth roughly $1.2 million a sum that is worth a quarter of Kampala’s New Mulago Hospital’s yearly budget.
“We’re going to change the whole culture of medicine in Uganda,” Haglund said.
Haglund was stunned by what he found or didn’t find at New Mulago Hospital during his visit.
The facility had 1,500 beds, but only one ventilator. Doctors were still using ether, an anesthesia first used in the mid-1800s, and had no anesthesia monitors. Nurses listen with a stethoscope for blood pressure readings because they had no automatic cuffs.
