Birat Medical College

On the second day of our trip we returned to the NICU of Birat Medical College here in Biratnagar, Nepal. This is a private tertiary level hospital with a well-equipped NICU with 5 infant warmers and 3 cribs. The room was bright and clean, and smelled of bleach with a hint of dirty diapers, as one may expect from a room with this many babies. The multiple  The infants were tightly wrapped in colorful blankets like hard candies from a jar. Take a look at the cool guy taking notes in the photo below.

However, this NICU was full of blaring noises, as multiple alarms sounded in unison occasionally drowned out by the piercing cries of babies.  The worst culprit was a temperature alarm that emitted a double chirp non-stop due to too low of a temperature because the temperature probe was not being used.  The nurses did not know how to disable the alarm so it just continued to sound in vein. We recorded a minute of sound as an example. Take a listen below.
<awesome audio clip pending...>

These auditory annoyances did not hinder the good quality of care that was being provided to the infants. Babies did not cry for long at all before being seen by the large number of nurses on duty. 

After our ovservations in the morning we got the chance to interview multiple nurses and get their feedback on our design concepts. Their responses did not agree at all, but that was actually more helpful for our engineering team as we attempt to design a better vital signs monitoring system. It was extremely helpful to get this feedback from our users who really are the experts of their domains. It is making me excited to design prototypes when we get back to the states in just over a week.

After a great day learning about the medical system here in Nepal we took a rickshaw to the local market to have a look around. It was slower and less terrifying than our usual taxi rides, but the pace allowed us to appreciate the surroundings much more. I was able to buy a small bag of popcorn off a street vendor for 20¢ and I really appreciated the small crunchy mid-day snack. Traveling on the roads sounded a lot like being in the NICU. Constant horns, sirens, and bells are going off as everybody tries to get where they're going as quickly and as cheaply as possible. All of the rickshaws have their bells mounted next to the spokes of the front tire so that the hammer hits the bell in rapid succession alerting (or not) all who walk in our way. 

Finally we discovered the roof of our hotel was a wonderful spot to collect our thoughts at the end of a long day, enjoy a beautiful sunset, and type up a (hopefully) good blog post.

Stay tuned for a future blog post about Koshi Zonal Hospital.