ABSTRACT

Hospitals in Malawi are daunting places. One of the main problems is that by the time many patients visit the hospital they are already in the late stages of an illness. This is due to a number of contributory factors, practical, cultural and financial. Views expressed by participants in an exhibition workshop included: ‘people who go to hospital always die’, and at hospital people are put onto an oxygen machine and ‘most of the times a patient that is put on oxygen dies and there are very few cases where a patient survives.’ 1 These opinions are corroborated by researchers and clinical staff based at Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Malawi. In health care, the disparity between what I will here call a ‘Western’ perspective and that of the people of Malawi is visible. In the UK, for example, with a population of 62.8 million people, the annual total expenditure per capita on health care is US $3,322; in Malawi, the population is 15.9 million and the annual expenditure per capita on health care is US $77 (World Health Organization 2012). Facts like these explain why there are so many international development projects addressing community health and sustainable development in Malawi. A recent collaborative project in Malawi’s second-largest city, Blantyre, using participatory museum practices to develop a new interactive exhibition, discovered an improvement in the health-seeking behavior of the participants.