Buda Hospital is located 3 hours north of Davao, almost directly on the main thoroughfare. But far enough away to be woken up in the morning only by the crowing of roosters and not by the noise of the road.
The hospital is very well organized and it is a good idea to first see how the staff, under the direction of the Filipino doctor Dr. Velasco, treat the most common illnesses.
These include many tropical diseases such as typhoid, dengue fever, rheumatic heart disease, many lung diseases such as asthma, but also pneumonia, which is so common in the tropics and sometimes life-threatening due to the immunodeficiency caused by malnutrition; but also severe skin infections, the extent of which is no longer known here.
The first case of polio in the Philippines for several years was discovered by us in December last year.
But all traffic and other accidents also end up with us for the time being and we provide emergency or final treatment or send them on a three-hour journey to Davao for further treatment in our own jeeps, free of charge for the patients.
As a pediatrician, you are also confronted with treating all patients during the night shift, which takes place every third night.
Now I come to the two main focuses of the pediatrician’s work.
One is the monitoring and, if necessary, treatment of newborns. It is important to know that there are around 900 births a year in our hospital in Buda (equivalent to a catchment area of 100,000 inhabitants in Germany). This is a situation that places even greater demands on the obstetricians from Germany, but also on us pediatricians.
And then at least a third of the pediatrician’s work is filled with saving severely malnourished children from starvation. Given the greenery that can be seen everywhere in the area and the agricultural possibilities, this is a very difficult situation to understand or accept.
But this shows the basic attitude of the German and Austrian Doctors: we cannot influence or change the political, external circumstances. We have to devote ourselves to the acute need of our patients (in my case, our little ones) and use all our strength and knowledge to bring these children, some of whom are threatened with death, back to a viable condition. This is not just a matter of “feeding them up” – it requires special medical guidance, both in terms of medication and special nutritional formulas. Thankfully, these are provided to us by a large French partner NGO “against hunger”.
When you see the following two pictures of such a little patient and remember them, then I know that my stay in Buda was not only successful but also enriching and rewarding for me as a pediatrician.
