Welcome to the Workshop!

I'm happy you found your way here! Let me share a bit about the mission of this website. I'm a US trained doctor who moved to work at a hospital in rural Africa. The first few years were a real learning experience, as I began to appreciate the challenges that doctors and nurses all over the world in lower resource settings have to deal with on a daily basis. Things like jerry-rigging a CPAP device because you've intubated an infant but are out of ventilators, to combining all your pressors in one pump and your sedatives in another because all the other syringe pumps are broken or in use, to emergency troubleshooting the medical gas system because you lost pressure, to putting three babies in an incubator because you ran out of incubators ten babies ago.

I remember looking around the NICU one day, seeing the donated German and American incubators standing powered down because we could not get the parts to fix them, seeing four of the five donated Indian incubators also idle for the same reason, but the 15 incubators built 30 years ago (of the Van Hemel design) standing battered but still functional. The realization that a simple, repairable design is often safer than the alternatives of either no equipment or fancy commercial equipment that is difficult to repair and hard for the staff to learn to use (because it works differently than the half dozen other donated models from as many different manufacturers) led me down a path of designing and building our own locally produced equipment.

Along the way I've been able to learn from and collaborate with a huge team of friends and colleagues from all over the world - doctors, nurses, electricians and carpenters, engineers and programmers. As some of the nearby hospitals, facing similar challenges, began to express interest in some of the devices we were using, the seed of an idea that became this website was planted. My hope is that others will benefit from our experiences as together we labor and learn to best use the resources we have to take care of our patients.