Intro

In June of 2007, we traveled to the Dominican Republic to investigate the opportunity for implementation of needle-free jet injectors (NFI) in the immunization program.

NFI delivers immunizations via a thin, high-speed liquid stream and eliminates many negative consequences incurred from using needles including biohazard sharps waste, inadvertent needle sticks, and needle reuse. We used individual interviews of health care workers, administrators, public policy makers, and international organization workers to gather feedback on the usability, cost saving potential, and adoptability of NFI technology for immunizations.

-Mike, Azucena, Sapun, and Rich

Wednesday, June 27, 2007

Day 18: June 27, 2007. This just in... the Americans have rescued us from needles!

Today we had a couple of special treats… 1) we got to visit a provincial office and hospital in an area outside of santo domingo called Bani and 2) I was on tv. All of our research thus far has been in Santo Domingo proper, though we did make it out to the rural area last week. But this was our opportunity to actually check out the injection safety scene in another province. In some ways we were able to confirm what we had been seeing and in some other ways we were entirely more confused by our results. Either way, we all had a good time.

I had the pleasure of interviewing the provincial health manager who turned out to be very enthusiastic about finding innovative ways to improve health in resource-limited countries. He recommended a book called “Why are some people healthy and others not?” by some Canadians which talks about basic lifestyle things other than curative medicine that contribute to health like a clean living and work environment, safe food, community responsibility, and, of course, preventative measures. That last one must have got him really stoked about our needle-free technology because he had arranged to have a local tv crew come videotape part of our interview. Surprise! It was pretty cool though. There was a reporter and two cameramen from a local webcast tv station called peraviavision.net (Peravia is the actual name of the province we were in). The clip was streamed live on the news that night and was absolutely hilarious to watch. Hopefully I will find a way to get a copy of it sometime soon.

Tonight we had one extra treat and got to cross off one of the very important items on our DR to-do list… we went to see a movie in English with Spanish subtitles. Now I know you can do this with most DVDs these days but there was something cool about doing it here, especially while we are trying to learn Spanish. The choice of movie made it all the better as we went to see Pirates of the Caribbean… in the Caribbean! Sweet. As expected, I slept through most of the movie.


-Rich

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