Mitchell Visits Zambian Home with CTN Mission

By Jon Parham

 (From left) Charlotte Yates, Ph.D., Anita Mitchell, Ph.D., and Whit Hall, M.D., traveled to Zambia to present a workshop on neonatal care.
(From left) Charlotte Yates, Ph.D., Anita Mitchell, Ph.D., and Whit Hall, M.D., traveled to Zambia to present a workshop on neonatal care.
Whit Hall shows recuscitation techniques to a group of midwives.
Whit Hall shows resuscitation techniques
to a group of midwives.
Anita Mitchell demonstrates neonatal care techniques during the workshop.
Anita Mitchell demonstrates neonatal care
techniques during the workshop.

Mitchell was there to present a workshop on neonatal care and resuscitation along with neonatologist Whit Hall, M.D., and physical therapist Charlotte Yates, Ph.D., all faculty in the UAMS Center for Translational Neuroscience.

The three also assisted local health care workers and consulted on patients in a small mission-run hospital. The group took equipment for workshop attendees and for donation to local health care organizations in the medically under-resourced country with a high infant mortality rate.

“A trip like this offers a big perspective because the world seems smaller today when you can travel to Africa in one day,” said Mitchell, an associate clinical professor in the College of Nursing. “All of these health problems they face are not far from us and not that different from what we face.

“We can learn from them how they are dealing with these problems in an environment where medical resources are lacking.”

The two-week visit in March was supported by the CTN and the trio. The workshop was underwritten by the Helping Babies Breathe initiative of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Hall, a professor in the College of Medicine’s Department of Pediatrics, said the daylong workshop drew about 25 midwives and nurses from a 40-mile radius around the Namwianga Mission near Kalomo in southern Zambia. The manikins, suction bulbs, masks and workbooks for the workshop were part of four suitcases of equipment the group took with them, then donated to the health care workers.

“It was good to do something to give back but little did I know it would be so rewarding and satisfying,” said Hall, making his first medical mission trip overseas.

Mitchell said the workshop included instruction on basic care techniques for newborns. She said the workshop attendees were overwhelmed with the reusable equipment they received in addition to the learning about techniques like kangaroo care. The practice, studied by Mitchell, Hall and Yates, emphasizes skin-to-skin contact between mother and infant.

One midwife, Tebia Kambulu, wrote a letter thanking the workshop organizers, saying the “meaningful workshop” came at the right time and place. “It may look to have been short but I want you to know it will go a long way, especially with the manikins that you have given to all the centers that were represented,” Kambulu wrote. “This will help health workers to practice more on manikins before doing the actual procedure on human beings.”

Yates, a neurobiology researcher in the CTN and an assistant professor in the Department of Physical Therapy at the University of Central Arkansas, said she welcomed the opportunity to help organize supplies for a planned physical therapy/occupational therapy practice at the mission.

“They have a therapist identified who is coming to consult on patients there,” she said. “They needed help organizing the space and taking inventory of the equipment they had and what they still needed.”

For Mitchell, the trip was especially emotional. She was born in Zambia, the daughter of missionaries. She grew up there before coming to the United States to earn her nursing degree in the UAMS College of Nursing, where her mother, a native Arkansan, had graduated.

She returned to Zambia where she met her husband, who was in the country from Kansas doing volunteer work. They raised their children in Zambia before returning to the United States. This Zambian visit was her first trip back since 1982.

“Overall, it has changed for the better,” Mitchell said, pointing to better health care facilities, more readily available supplies and a better economy. Though still underdeveloped and a health system still lacking, she found reason for hope.

“When I left 30 years ago, they had a one-room hospital. In that sense, I saw huge progress,” she said of the now larger health care facility at the Namwianga Mission.

But it was tempered by the increasing number of orphanages in the country, wracked by AIDS. The group visited some of the orphanages as well as schools and other area health care facilities.

Mitchell did get to see one of the homes she lived in growing up and visit a grade school classmate now in Africa as a malaria and HIV researcher, Philip Thuma, M.D.

Asked about memorable experiences, Hall recalled a patient he was asked to see, 26-month-old orphan Lulu. An examination showed a severe stomach infection and dehydration. An X-ray showed probably tuberculosis, so treatment was started, but the little girl died within 24 hours and the Hall, Mitchell and Yates attended the emotional funeral.

“It really illustrated the problem,” Hall said of the case. “We didn’t know for sure that she had HIV but she probably did. They didn’t have the lab capabilities to culture and confirm TB.”

Attending the funeral “really made it personal,” he said.

This trip is one of several international activities in the Center for Translational Neuroscience. The Telemedicine Core Facility that supports PedsPLACE and EDsPLACE has viewers across Europe, Latin America and Asia.