| Students help out, learn from clinics overseas
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| Friday
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Foreign-Trained Nurse-Learn how to work as a nurse in the United States
Eze,” I asked, “I was just wondering . . . when someone gets injured . . . say, falls from a tree or, God forbid, [gets] shot or stabbed . . . what happens to them?”
“If I found a man shot on my doorstep, I would give him some water and some bread.”
“But what about his life? Is the hospital called? Does anyone take him to the hospital?”
“Oh no, no no no. Calling the hospital will bring the police here. They will beat us, and arrest us.”
“But if there is no hospital care . . . does anyone do anything? Do they . . . survive?”
Eze responded, “Those who are fit will survive . . . ”
Jared Sun ‘09 encountered the grim reality of a South African township’s emergency medical care system on one of his first days with Stanford’s Cape Town, South Africa program. The experience was enough to prompt Sun and other Stanford students to help improve local critical-case response, and after contending with South African norms, the group decided that a community-based EMT system could address the failing government service. Much of the rest of their study abroad experience then focused on establishing the local infrastructure.
Sun is one of a growing number of Stanford students whose interests in medicine and healthcare have fused with an itch to go abroad, either in a University study-abroad program, a summer seminar or a self-driven scheme. Often fresh from HumBio lecture, these students are exploring medicine and healthcare internationally, and they’re finding that being a doctor’s shadow abroad — let alone making an impact — means adapting to an entirely new set of beliefs about human need.
Emily Dansereau ‘10 learned firsthand this summer in Cochabamba, Bolivia that outsiders have to be prepared to let the local institutions they encounter govern what students can do to help.
Dansereau and Brindha Saravanabavanandhan’10 were eager to teach young Bolivian girls about healthy exercise when they first arrived in Cochabamba. They were surprised, however, when they were told to stop a yoga demonstration they were giving at a women’s center. It “went against the center’s philosophy,” they were told, because yoga was not Christian.
Over the next few weeks in the clinics, Dansereau confronted homophobia, conflicting opinions about birth control and teen pregnancy and a wariness towards Americans.
“I was conscious to say that I am opposed to many of the current government’s policies,” Dansereau said. “I sometimes felt that I was actively distancing myself from my identity as an American.”
Regardless of the reservations she faced daily at the Cochabamba clinic, Dansereau eventually found that the materials and infrastructure to make a serious difference existed — it was simply a matter of asking.
About three weeks into the program, Dansereau and a fellow volunteer envisioned a new project.
“Another volunteer and I wanted to start a dental health project,” she said. “We asked at the clinic if they had ideas of where we could get informational material. They told us that they actually already have lots of materials — for dental health [as well as] rabies, maternal health and other projects. All the materials were just sitting there because there was no one to use them.”
Dansereau, armed with 700 toothbrushes and 300 tubes of toothpaste, led demonstrations of healthy dental hygiene to all who would listen, and ended up making the impact she sought to make.
Though Dansereau and Sun reported that the clinics they served struggled with bureaucratic shortcomings, not all aspects of the medical systems that Stanford students have encountered abroad reflect negatively on the infrastructure of the governments there.
Dansereau was impressed by the fact that, in Bolivia, consultations and treatments are relatively inexpensive. A consultation, for example, costs six bolivianos, equivalent to about 85 cents.
Sun saw the most generosity pouring from individual nurses, volunteers and community organizations within the townships he visited. He shadowed a single nurse, and her bravery was nothing like a routine round at Lucille Packard Children’s Hospital.
“[She was] the only nurse on duty for a hospital condemned with gunshot wounds, stabs, drugs and alcohol,” Sun said.
Though they have a starkly different set of customs to adapt to, the budding healthcare advocates and practitioners offered the same general wisdom on embarking on a clinical experience abroad. Change, they noted, comes after weeks of shadowing doctors and seeing the unbelievable range of cases that come through a clinic daily. It takes understanding and creativity to assess a clinic community’s needs from the outside.
Sun still maintains contact with the EMT program he helped establish, and it has been one of his greatest undertakings as a Stanford student.
“The idea is community empowerment,” he said. “It is one of the most ambitious projects I’ve ever done independently, and even if it is not fully successful, I know that I am at least making some benefit and that I will learn a lot through the process.”
Dansereau agreed that learning through doing is what makes studying abroad so valuable.
“It’s so easy to get comfortable at Stanford and caught up in your life there,” she said. “There’s the potential to learn a lot from time in a medical setting abroad; there’s also the potential to contribute a lot. But if you want to do either of these, you will have to be very proactive.”(source)
Foreign-Trained Nurse-Learn how to work as a nurse in the United States |
posted by blogger @ 06:00
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