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Zimbabwe Career Connect is a program that enables Zimbabwean students learning abroad to gain work experience in their fields of interest. Through ZCC I served as a health intern at Ecosurgica, shadowing a neurosurgeon and two urologists. I joined them to visit some major hospitals in Harare, Zimbabwe including The Avenues Clinic, Parirenyatwa Hospital, Harare General Hospital and Milton Park Medical Center. At the hospitals, I observed procedures surgeries in such as Transurethral resection of the prostate (TURP) to treat enlarged prostate, nerve block injections for chronic pain management, carpal tunnel surgery to relieve pressure on the median nerve for nerve injury, botox injection for overactive bladder, thoracic decompression and vertebral kyphoplasty to reverse spinal compression due to tumors. This gave me a glimpse of patient and health worker experience and satisfaction in both private and government hospitals in Zimbabwe. I assisted staff in finance, administration and biomedical engineering with some of their day to day tasks, gaining an understanding of hospital operations and healthcare management.
As an intern I also wrote articles on menstrual hygiene and grooming for a health and wellness magazine called Flourish to promote healthy lifestyle. I also collaborated with staff from the Discovereum Children’s museum to compile and design low cost games and toys for children living with disabilities using Artificial Intelligence tools in Shurugwi, a rural community in Zimbabwe.
Moreover, I introduced an Electronic Health Records system for Ecosurgica to enable them to carry out note taking using voice recognition software during patient consultations, have a cloud based data storage system instead of a server based system and integrate their data from all departments including finance and patient data through Carepatron which has a free package, making it affordable. This is expected to minimize human error, allow management of high patient traffic, ensure safer data storage and increase overall efficiency.
Lastly, I visited the African Institute of Biomedical Science and Technology to learn about their work in Genomics, Therapeutics and Bioinformatics. This experience has propelled me to conduct secondary research on the potential of additional HPV vaccination schemes for Zimbabwe.