Today we went to the BIDI Infectious Disease Hospital and got to learn about TB and HIV. The hospital works under Thailand’s department of Public Health, Department of Disease Control. It was founded in 1960 and has 250 beds. It is a referral hospital for several specific diseases, including cholera, rabies, AIDS, SARS, MERS-CoV, and Ebola.
The hospital provides free condoms, HIV screening for individuals and for couples, counseling, and both PrEP (Pre-Exposure prophylaxis) and PEP (Post-exposure prophylaxis) (however, these aren’t free for everyone). Patients with HIV can come to the hospital and see any doctor because they are all specialists in this area to lessen the stigma and discrimination of the disease. They also have every doctor specialized in TB so patients only have to see one doctor for both their HIV and TB infections (because they are often seen together). This minimizes the risk of adverse drug effects and drug drug interactions between the medications since the doctors are specifically trained to watch out for them. All HIV drugs are free to patients, as long as they are first or second line medications. They are either covered by the Thai government or the WHO foundation. Anything that isn’t covered can be purchased by the patient, but they are pretty expensive. However, Thailand has a lot of generic HIV medications that we don’t have generics for yet in the US. It was very interesting to hear about how cautious they are about stigma and how much they want to minimize it in the country.
An example of the prescription pad for HIV medications that are covered by the Thai government.
We also had lectures about the drugs used to treat TB and how the hospital uses a negative pressure system in their isolation rooms so they don’t put their health care workers at risk. We then got to see the inpatient and outpatient TB wards. It was concerning at first because we were not given masks, but they didn’t have any patients with active TB today. They don’t allow students to visit on days when they have their TB clinics to minimize the risk and because of the negative pressure airflow, there is only a small risk of infection anyway.
They call the TB clinic the Respiratory Disease Unit to decrease the stigma associated with these patients.
This is a picture of a bed in the inpatient TB ward.
They just built a brand new isolation ward with newer negative pressure systems that were very interesting to see.
This is an example of the isolation rooms. There are vents by the patients head that suck the air out of the room, causing a negative pressure so the patient’s respiration won’t spread throughout the room.
The control monitor for the new isolation rooms. You can compare to the old monitor as seen below.
Kayla and Tiffany got to practice gowning up with the nurse on the isolation floor.
This is an example of the old control monitors outside of the older isolation rooms.
This is the control panel for all of the isolation rooms on the older ward.
After spending the day learning all about HIV, we then went back to Cabbages and Condoms for Dr. Tanzer’s birthday. It was a good last night in Bangkok before we fly to Chaing Mai tomorrow!
Marina and I were showing off our selfie game at dinner :)
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