KCH is an 800 bed government general referral hospital for the central region of Malawi situated in the Capital City,Lilongwe with a drawing population of about five million people. The department of Surgery is composed of 240 beds shared by the subspecialties - general surgery and trauma, orthopaedics, urology, paediatric sursgery, head and neck surgery and limited plastic, thoracic and neurosurgery for trauma.
The trauma service is extremely busy because of the high accident rate. We see an average of 20 truma patients a day and admit over 700 severely injured multi system trauma cases a year. Over 5000 major general surgical cases a year are operated on.
The attending staff has been augmented by aid from western countries (mainly volunteers from the US) volunteers from the United Nations and other international volunteer services in the last 4 years. Before this there was only one consistent general surgeon with minimal short term assistance from concerned countries (mainly the US). Four general surgeons, two urologist
and recently an orthopaedic surgeon now comprise the attending staff.
The bottleneck in departmental performance is in the support clinicians staff who will handle a busy trauma service 24 hours a day, attend to critical care beds, assist in the operating rooms, attent to out patient and ward services. This is shared by six clinicians who have agreed to commit themselves to handle all the phases of activity of the department at their level. The arrangement has been providing consistent reliable coverage of the department especially during this year.
Enclosed are some pictures of the different departmental activities of KCH these 6 clinicians are handling.
Thank you very much for your continuous support.
Sincerely yours,
Arturo P. Muyco, MD
Head, Department of Surgery
