Story by Dr. William Mol (Specialist Medical Officer in Plastic & Reconstructive Surgery)

The only head & neck surgery unit in the highlands region, is based at Goroka General Hospital. The team consist of Dr. Sam Endican (Specialist Medical Officer in Ear-Nose-Throat & Head & Neck Surgery), Dr. Matupi Apaio (Specialist Medical Officer in Oral & Maxillo-facial Surgery) and Dr. William Mol (Specialist Medical Officer in Plastic & Reconstructive Surgery). This is the first of each kind where such a team of specialist Drs has visited Mt. Hagen General Hospital. In the past, only the ENT or the maxillo-facial team has visited the Mt. Hagen General Hospital. This visit was from April 13th to 18th 2009 (5 days).

The category of patients seen includes those with suspected Head & Neck Cancers, Vascular anomalies, facial bone fractures. A good number of cases were operated on. Nevertheless, the problems we faced were:

1. Patients were not short listed well as some patients that we saw could have been treated by the general practitioners or the general surgeons.

2. Because of slowness in patient preparations, the operations were started late and finished early, as a result, we ran out of time and many cases were deferred.

3. The theatre staffs were not familiar with the set up required for our cases; as a result the preparations were too slow, resulting in a huge loss time.

4. No surgical registrars allocated to assist our team resulting also in loss time doing their part of the job.

5. The only anaesthetic technical officer was overworked.
To improve on our next visit, we propose to include in our team, at least 1 registrar, an anaesthetist and a nurses. We have scheduled our team to visit the other highlands regions regularly, including Kundiawa, Mendi & Wabag throughout this year.

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