Oxygen Therapy in the Jungle
Story and photos by Dr David Mills
The lack of power at remote health centres has a number of ramifications. Obviously, not having light to manage patients after dusk is a major handicap (staff tend to do the best they can with torches). Cold storage of vaccines is another issue that has major implications. Vaccines not only prevent the specific intended diseases (eg measles) but also have major effects on what we call “all cause mortality” – that is to say they have been shown to decrease death from any cause very significantly. So getting cold storage is a major objective we have been working on for several years. Over the years we have installed 12V solar systems to run LED lighting and to provide solar refrigeration but we have never been able to run 240V equipment of any size.
One of the other very significant needs that has still been lacking is the need for oxygen, critical to the treatment of young children with pneumonia (which is one of the most common clinical presentations in rural PNG).
Oxygen therapy is not an option in most rural places because it has to be transported in cylinders which don’t last long and there are fairly severe limits on transporting compressed gases by aircraft, not to mention the cost. Many children die as a result.
This is one of the machines used to bring life-giving oxygen to children in desperate need
For all the above reasons we have begun to install 240V AC solar systems in our health centres. These small systems enable us not only to run lights but also a small oxygen concentrator which can take oxygen out of the air (21% of the air is oxygen), and bump that up to a supply of around 95% or more. The system creates about 5kVA of standard 240V electricity. Staff can charge mobile phones (increasingly seen as a necessity even in very remote parts of PNG) and use other low power equipment where they need to.
It is a huge step up in possibilities for us.
On the 4th Jan 2016 we sent most of the gear from Kompiam a couple of weeks in advance down to Lapalama by air with MAF. Parts that would not fit in the plane, such as the solar panel rails, were walked down with the team (about a 9-hour walk). The entire patrol went for 4 days – two days travelling time and two days on the ground, with one doctor and one medical student running clinics all day while two of us put in the system.
So far it seems to be working well. At the end of February we will do our second installation at Marambe (Rum airstrip) health centre. MAF has already flown the materials to Rum, which include four large solar panels, two batteries, some accessories and the control panel. The weight of these is about 250kg in total. All had to be packed fairly delicately with some mattresses to avoid breakage.
240V power installations enabling small remote health centres to install an oxygen concentrator means that small children with pneumonia can now be treated there with oxygen therapy, which is a big step forward for them. It also means they can use small electronic equipment and have lights in all the health centre rooms.
