Medical Tent Pharmacy

If you like chaos, the medical tent pharmacy is the place for you! That is the last stop for patients who come to receive medical care from Open Arms International.

Recipe for pharmacy chaos: Take a group of volunteers who have no pharmacy background. Give them prescriptions written by doctors (need I say more?) and ask them to accurately fill them. Cram them into too small of a space so they can bump into each other on a regular basis. (What I call "working cheek-to-cheek”)

The amazing thing is that IT WORKS! By the third day we could have handed out certificates. The lay people had learned how to decipher prescriptions, locate specific medications on the tables or in containers, count and label bags properly, find substitutes for the meds that we didn’t have, etc.

Ruth Major, Kenya staff volunteer, was brilliant (she's from the UK; they use that term a lot)overseeing the pharmacy. She had the space well organized and posted signs on the walls the second day to help decode prescription shorthand.

The OAI medical director, Rachel Gallagher, and I were available to check prescriptions for accuracy. Rachel was the epitome of tolerance as she answered a barrage of questions from volunteer workers (including me), e.g. What does this say? Where is this drug? What does BID mean?

I only had to work with interpreters the first day giving instructions to the patients when they received their medications. Our interpreters knew how to do it themselves on the second day! Alpha Sarara is pictured here giving instructions for cough syrup dosage. I met Alpha on my first mission trip to Eldoret in 2006. His father, Milton, is on the OAI Kenya board of directors.

P.S. The temperature in the pharmacy area was hot enough to melt the soft gel vitamins!