Our most recent clinic launched in the village of Deurali, where Hira runs a clinic at the Health Post every Wednesday. We were in Deurali a few weeks ago for a supervisory visit–or more specifically, a veteran technician K.P. was visiting Hira for mentor supervision, Rajendra our medical coordinator was supervising K.P.’s supervision, and I was there to see Rajendra supervising K.P. supervising Hira. So as you can see we’re doing our best to address any issues around lack of supervision and monitoring for primary care operators in rural Health Posts.

Hira’s been doing awesome in her clinic and already has a week of post-certification professional development under her belt, but we’re still working on building the patient flow in Deurali. This is no surprise; everywhere in the world, people are slow to seek dental care, especially for preventative and early-stage treatment. Rural Nepal is no different, and Health Post dental clinics don’t get much traffic unless paired with strong outreach and a referral system. We’re still getting rolling in Deurali, and this month the local Team Leader, Prashanna, organized an outreach gathering for a local Mother’s Group where his wife is an active member.

We piled in to a car at the office and arrived in Deurali mid-morning, having looped through the neighboring village of Rupakot to pick up Kamala, a talented clinic assistant who works in the Rupakot dental clinic and came to assist Hira for the day. Hira packed up a field kit from the Health Post, and we unloaded the supplies a short walk up the road at the Mother’s Group community building. This building was damaged in the 2015 earthquake, so we found ourselves in a completely normal half of a building with half a roof. The other half was open to both sky and the sweep of surrounding hills, not to mention that the road had recently been bulldozed and taken a chunk of the hillside with it, so the concrete floor dropped off precipitously, in mid-air, creating the effect of a film set on the edge of a cliff.

Behind the half-building, people began setting up a plastic chairs and stringing up a tarp for shade. Because it was the first adult outreach program in Deurali, our two education coordinators Bidhya and Shreedhar had come from the office to lead the workshop and model it for the local team leader Prashanna, who will soon become Deurali’s master of ceremonies for such events. Bidhya and Shreedhar are also new to our team, so this was their first adult outreach too, and they’d spent a good deal of time going through our teaching protocols and creating clever new materials to use. Hira and Kamala set up the treatment area to provide free screening, limited treatments of fluoride varnish and silver diamine fluoride, and referral tickets to the regular Wednesday clinic up the road.

People began to trickle in, take their seats, and chat. When the chairs were full, Prachanna and the primary health worker from the Health Post kicked off the morning. Then they handed the session off to Bidhya and Shreedhar, who inaugurated their roles on our team by doing a phenomenal job by engaging the crowd in an animated discussion. They covered everything from oral hygiene to junk-food-free schools to explanations of Hira’s available services in the Health Post.

I really love this example of Bidhya working what’s called “people-centeredness.” People-centeredness actually specific a term used by the World Health Organization as part of its quality-of-care framework. But what does it mean in practice? Health care that is attuned to lived experiences, that is easy to relate to, that is compatible with the physical and cultural environment. People may not leap out of bed to go get dental care, but they often have no problem talking at length about their teeth and the stories inside of them. What I saw watching Bidhya and Shreedhar work the crowd was not a lecture, but a dialogue not so different from the way that Aamaa and I sit around with Saraswoti and Saano Didi and Maya Bouju in the evenings, cataloguing the day and comparing notes about the world. There is a wealth of available wisdom already present in any community.

After the presentation, people waited as long as four hours for a screening in the half-of-a-community building. There was a 104 year old man, a woman with a difficult home life that made it challenging to arrange an initial screening at the Health Post, and a series of patients perfectly timed for interventions recently covered in our Professional Development Seminar on Aging. Watching as residents passed the time in plastic chairs, waiting their turn and talking about their teeth and other life topics, I pondered the fact that the Health Post, which offers the exact same services plus more, with the exact same provider, every week and ten minutes up the road, has struggled with patient flow. But the plastic chairs under the tarp was people-centered.

Hira screened about sixty residents before the wind picked up and began blowing rain in to the wallless clinic space. Before we repacked everything, she gave out forty referral tickets and delivered a swath of preventive fluoride treatments. I think she’ll keep busy in her clinic the next few weeks!

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