Background: Medical ward is a ward specialized for the care of patients with general infections and non-infectious diseases. The department is made up of specialized physicians with nursing staff.

Medical ward serves to manage patients admitted with both infectious and non-infectious medical conditions. The mode of management is usually through careful detailed history taking and examinations with basic related laboratory and imaging investigations concluded by giving proper medications for the particular medical condition. In the world the top ten cause of hospital admissions and mortality are Ischemic heart diseases, stroke, COPD, lower respiratory infections, lung cancer, HIV/AIDS, D.M, road injury and hypertension,HIV/AIDS remains the number one cause of morbidity in Africa with an estimate of 4.9% adults affected with the disease. In Mbeya regional hospital medical ward the top ten cause of admissions includes HIV/AIDS, complicated malaria, tuberculosis, D.M, Diarrhea, stroke, hypertension, pneumonia and congestive cardiac failure.

Mbeya regional hospital is a secondary referral level hospital with a purpose of serving Mbeya region with a population of more than 2 million people. It is located in Mbeya district which is one of 6 administrative districts namely Chunya, Mbozi, Ileje, Rungwe and Mbalali the hospital receives referral patients from mentioned district hospitals. The hospitals has currently fully working medical, gynecology, CTC, and OPD departments with pediatric and surgical departments under construction. The hospital has total of 78 beds with 40 and 38 medical and gynecological department respectively. It has a total of 162 staff members among them are 2 specialists and 7 M.D’s.

Activities undertaken during field attachment: The routine I adopted throughout the attachment field was to firstly attend the morning clinical meeting where I was able to find out if there were new admission or whether there were new patients that occurred during my absence. These included patients admitted during the past 24 hours and if there were any deaths. After morning meeting people departure to work on their department for me my department was medical ward. Routinely there is ward round on every weekdays. In my ward I was able to participate in management of admitted patients and we had a total of 88 admitted patients in both male and female medical wards. Top ten patients diagnose were as follows.