Newsroom
Two days are never the same - Dr Daniel Claughton
Daniel came to Mosvold straight from Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital, a teaching institution in Perth, where he did his first year as a medical officer. He found himself getting bored in that year and decided to do a six month post in a rural South African hospital, which could be credited towards his GP training.
“The job description said I’d be doing all of these crazy things, but until I actually got here the realisation couldn’t sink in. I didn’t want to get my hopes up, in case it was just like what I’d had before in Australia; it just felt too good to be true. But I got here and they basically just handed me a scalpel as I walked into theatre and said, ‘Do this’. Obviously they helped me with the first few caesareans, but after that I’ve been doing it all on my own.”
“I never had much responsibility when I was at home. I was always one of a thousand doctors or something, and you’d look after a few sick patients, putting in drips but you’d never have the whole hospital to look after. That’s how all the doctors operate here: we have one ward each and then we all have to look after the outpatients and do operations, and after hours there’s one doctor who looks after the whole hospital. That means that any emergency that comes in has to be treated.”
And he has found that South African emergencies are very different to Australian emergencies. “Patients in Australia were a lot less critical. Here, if you’re doing an emergency, it means someone’s very likely to die, the sort of scenario which would make front-page headlines back in Australia but happens every day here.”
After the initial shock, he says his colleagues have made the adjustment as easy for him as they could. “There’s been really good support here from so many doctors, they were always ready to step in and help you out if you had a problem. And you realise that technically it’s actually not very difficult to do a caesarean, or all the other operations.” He is nonchalant about the process of dealing with massive changes. “When you’re here you just seem to get on with life. You don’t ask yourself, ‘How do I cope with this?’ You just do. I’m a lot less fazed by things now. Back in the day, one exciting thing would happen every six months in an Australian hospital.
“Everything I’ve done here in the last six months has been a new experience. I think the variety is definitely the best thing. Two days are never the same, you could be delivering a baby, giving a general anaesthetic, resuscitating a patient, doing an autopsy, treating a patient who’s been stabbed in a fight and dealing with TB and HIV, which are really challenging medical problems.”
He has also found that Africa is not necessarily as scary as he thought it would be. “When I came out I was worried about getting Aids and TB. Now...well, there’s a risk of Aids, but it’s tiny. If you look after yourself and don’t stick yourself with needles and cover yourself in blood, you’d have to fall over yourself to catch it, especially with good ARVs at the moment.
As long as you’re not stupid, you shouldn’t catch Aids.”
Although the hospital is very isolated, Dan says he has a very good social life. We’ve been through a lot together, like just seeing people die as well as all the good times, having parties and making trips out to Mozambique and things like that, a really rich experience together. That’s probably been one of the very best things about being here.”
“It sometimes feels too amazing to be true. Experiencing Zulu culture is incredible. This village, in some ways it’s like nothing’s changed in the last five hundred years. About 95% of the people here still have no running water, they look at you like they’ve never seen a white person before, and I think it’s pretty amazing to be able to live in a pretty much stereotypical African village and be accepted the way that we are, given the history of South Africa. It’s a real joy to be a part of their lives.”
