KKH A&E
the staff there are nice and helpful! they are even better as compared to the staff in ward and OT. they are very willing to teach us and share their experience with us. not only are the staff nice, my Clinical instructor is also very very nice. guess who??? haha, is Mrs CHEONG! she is my class mentor, she even gave us Ferrero Rocher on the last day of attachment. so overall grading for staff A**************

the cases we see in the A&E are not as exciting as the other hospitals. what we usually see are kids coming in for fever, fever and fever or cough, cough and cough! out of 10 kids, 8 will fall under this two category. some kids have fever for like more than 5 days on and off so the parent bring them to A&E. for patient who have fever for a long time they will usually do a blood test to further investigate or to see if it is caused by virus or bacteria. cough is really common in children. they will have cough, phlegm and blocked nose. some are quite serious eg. asthma and bronchitis. sometimes you can hear wheezing, rhonchi or crackle lung sound. so for them they will usually do suctioning or Ventolin puff through MDI and spacer.

the other cases we see are eg fracture, cut, rashes, vomiting, diarrhoea, fits, abscess and baby with jaundice. the procedure we observed are M&R (manipulation and reduction) for fractures, T&S (toileting and suturing) for deep cuts, (I&D) incision and drainage for abscess. i think these are what i observed, nothing much. the kids will be under conscious sedation.

unlike other hospital, they did alot of resuscitation, CPR, ECG and see a lot of trauma and road traffic accident cases. In kkh, is more like a clinic instead of A&E.

However, we are quite fortunate to be able to see a trauma case on the first day of posting. A 11 years old girl is involved in a road traffic accident. the gal is on the way home after school when she is hit by a motorcycle. the paramedics found her lying at the road curb. she is badly badly injured. she is semi conscious, she has a open fracture(the bone pierced through the skin) at the shin bone, she has head injury and her ear is bleeding. her PE shirt is filled with blood. trauma code is immediately activated once she arrived. in kkh there are different code which signify different things. when a code is activated, the whole hospital can hear the announcement, this is to alert all medical staff. so different medical personnel came down to the A&E department, eg anaesthetist, surgeon, ICU staff, Medical social worker..... the resus room was crowded, there are 20 over doctors in the room! of course some doing nothing like us, just standing there and watch.

the medical social worker had a hard time contacting her parents. they called the school and the number they gave is not updated. think after abt 45 mins they managed to call her parents and you know wat, at first the parents say that they can't leave their work and they will only be coming down at night. GOSH! your daughter is so badly injured and is fighting for her life here. think they don know how serious it is. but i think the MSW insisted that they should come down now, thus i think they came down. the gal went for op immediately after she is stabilised. on Friday, i heard she is still in ICU but she is already awake:) the accident is also reported in the newspaper.

we checked the record book, they never activate the trauma code for months. so is a rare opportunity to see such cases coming in.

that's all for A&E posting. can consider working there too but i think most prob not.

this week: i am busy gg to sch for the overseas presentation and some other stuff. we got to present to our sch director and different hospital staff and director about our trip. the rehearsal is quite a waste of time and usually it drags more than 3 hours. they are quite particular of wat we say cos there are external guests.

i decided to post some sacpb alumni performance at chinatown on dumpling festival. i have been busy lately and not able to join them for a few shows:( love them lots!

wan ying was the main lead, repinique! gwen and erica played the Jembe, regina and mel played the surdo, val played the agogo and me snare. not forgetting grace who came to support us:)

after the performance