By Livi Rees
We have now been in Yangon for two weeks, and are
feeling thoroughly settled into life out here. We have decorated our flat with
photos from home and posters with Burmese vocab we need to learn for our
lessons, and have been making friends both inside and outside the hospital.
This week we have continued our observation of the working practices on the
unit and have been collecting some more detailed information about the trauma
patients. In particular we have been looking at their route of admission into hospital
and the length of time between traumatic event and definitive treatment, which
seems to vary a great deal which is very interesting.
On Friday we delivered our first training session to the nurses on the ICU
which was very well received. We covered the acute care of spinal cord injured
patients, and Stuart was a very good sport letting the team log roll him many
many times! We were joined in our teaching by a volunteer from Glasgow called
Julie Doverty, she is an anaesthetist who is in Yangon for three months working
with anaesthetic trainees in theatres. We are keen to promote the idea of
multidisciplinary working in the ICU so are very excited about working with her
in the coming months.
We had been concerned about the language barrier
when teaching, but in this session we felt the level of comprehension was quite
good as the nurses were very engaged and asked lots of questions, and it was
very encouraging to see colleagues translating for one another if they had a
higher level of English.
It has been another busy week meeting lots of people connected to the ICU and
socialising with other volunteers in the city. We went to a classical music
concert organised by the Goethe institute on Friday night, and on Saturday we
went to see a football game (Myanmar vs Bolivia) at the stadium in the East of
the city.