August 14, 2014
During the morning our group set out to find general practioners (GP) in the community. Raju was kind enough to drive us around us to some of the GP homes and buildings in the local neighbourhood and we tested our luck on getting inside to see them. One of our contacts was a medical practitioner at the Shruthi Clinic, Banjara Hills. He provided us some valuable insights on his practice in treating general ailments with medication and first aid, plus the way he detects patients with obvious cardiac symptoms and refers them onto cardiologists for more specialized care. Another contact we made was a GP at the Familia Hospital and Diagnostic Centre nursing home. She explained how they do not have the facilities here to perform definitive diagnostic tests for bradycardia, so they will prescribe immediate pain relief drugs, take blood pressure and oxygen saturation tests, administer an IV line to rehydrate the patients, and will then refer patients onto CARE Hospital for further care. She spoke to us about her medical training and her approach to patients experiencing syncope, which strengthened some of the insights we had already been receiving from other stakeholders. Overall a productive morning that kept adding to our story!
After plenty of running and driving around, we all got back together at the hotel to prepare for a skype meeting with the director of Medtronic's Healthy Heart for All (HHFA) program. We had a very insightful conversation and we all felt like we developed a much better picture of the goals of the initiative, its various components and its success so far. When this interview ended, we all had a long discussion and brain dump with our thoughts on the HHFA initiative and our project as a whole, which helped us once again refocus and organize our strategy for the next few days.
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| Team brain dump in the hotel |
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| Team brain dump in the hotel |
Following this, we decided to clear our exhausted minds, so the boys took some down time whilst the girls took a trip to the nearby mall to buy some Indian clothes! Maddie and Erin had their first experience riding in an auto-rickshaw, which gave a completely different perspective on the traffic surrounding them. Shruthi describes it as 'peace among the chaos.' All three of them ended up having a successful shopping trip and made it back a few bags heavier.
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| Erin and Maddie in the auto-rickshaw |
The boys had gone out to dinner in the meantime, so when they arrived back we met up at the hotel to hang out together and enjoy a nice relaxing evening.
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