Our research today took us to Kikuyu, in the Kiambu county just north of Nairobi, to visit the P.C.E.A Kikuyu hospital, a mission hospital run by the P.C.E.A. (Presbyterian Church of East Africa).
This hospital is has numerous specialties in different departments, it has a well renowned ophthalmology center, the best in Kenya, a strong orthopedics department, dentistry, and general medicine.
Our main contact here was Dr. Jay Yagnik, a first year surgical resident who is very interested in pursuing Minimally Invasive Surgery. However the hospital itself has not been practicing laparoscopic surgery at all recently, which we learned when we spoke to Dr. Mwanzia, an attending surgeon, who explained that because of decreased numbers during the COVID-19 pandemic, and financial costs when compared with open surgery, there have been no laparoscopic surgeries, it just was not profitable during the time. Their laparoscopic tower had never even been used, despite the hospital having purchased it 7 years ago.
We went around the hospital to speak to numerous doctors and administrators, who all expressed interest in opening the hospital up to laparoscopic surgery again, there just needed to be good circumstances to do so. Dr. Yagnik also showed us some of his training boxes, which he himself built to train on, and gave to numerous institutions, such as Karen hospital. It was quite interesting to hear the politics and behind the scenes explanations of how the hospitals have to balance what they practice. Dr. Yagnik was absolutely wonderful, and we are planning to see him again before we depart from Kenya.
After we were finished at Kikuyu, we purchased boiled corn from street vendors and ate it in the car, it was very good! We then went to a street market to eat more food before our next arrangement, I had shawarma and samosas, and both were excellent.
Finally, we met with Niraj Hirani, a biomedical engineer in Nairobi, who is working on interesting technology related to our work. His company, Medi-Ware, mainly focuses on repairing medical devices, but he also has been working on numerous very interesting low-cost alternatives to expensive medical equipment that he hopes to be able to expand to African healthcare systems. He is also has many well renowned collaborators, such as Manu Prakash at Stanford University. He was incredibly interesting to talk to, and his technology very much applied to our target goals with our project.
It was a very productive day, and I think we learned a lot. It was interesting to explore a different kind of hospital, as well as to see a locally based biotech startup.