Adventuras de BYU Nursing en Espana!

While a few of us were able to start clinical yesterday in El Centro de Salud, or Spain's primary healthcare center, our clinical rotations at a large hospital in Madrid started today! It's called Ramón y Cajal and is a hospital of 11 floors and over 1,100 beds. We are working with nurses who are also professors at the University of Alcalá's College of Nursing, so they are great with students and are giving us lots of opportunities to learn. Some of us worked in the Emergency Department as triage nurses and others on the pediatric floor. Without sharing specifics, it sounds like everyone has been having a great experience and the nurses and patients are more than welcoming! My experience at El Centro de Salud was similar in that they just about wrapped their arms around us and want to learn about our healthcare system just as much as we want to learn about theirs. Everyone here seems to be pleased with their socialistic system which allows everyone to have free public healt...

Today was a pretty chill day. Sheri traveled to the university to figure out our clinical paperwork in the morning, and we all got ready for our day. Mary and Kirsten headed to clinical at El Centro de Salud (the health clinic), at 10 am. The rest of us took some time to enjoy our day off form clinical and stopped for some chocolate and churros before heading to the mall. Larissa and Lauren guided us to the mall of Alcala and we spent some time shopping. There were all kinds of stores, some familiar ones like H&M, and a lot of new stores I had never seen before, like Zara. Kirie and Sheri headed back to the apartment at 1pm and the rest of us got some lunch at the mall food court. We had "chicago style" pizza at the mall, although it wasn't "chicago style," it was still pretty good! We all met up with Mary and Kirsten at 3pm to tour the Palacio Laredo in Alcala. Unfortunately, we forgot to notice that it was closed on Mondays, so no tour! We decided to come ...

I am posting this a day late.  However......We had a great day yesterday! We had a short nite Friday night/Saturday morning as we needed to be back in Madrid for a bike tour.  (Our apartment is about 1 hour by train from center of Madrid). But the bike tour was awesome, especially after we have been walking 8-10 miles every day.  The guide took us all over Madrid for 3.5 hours. We saw plenty and stopped periodically for water breaks and pictures.  They have some Egyptian ruins from a temple that would have been covered by the lake of the Answan Dam in Egypt. Cool but not necessarily from Spain. After the bike tour we stopped at a pricey “pasteleria” (fancy bakery) and each of us tried a few pastry/chocolate delicacies (pictured).  The one I liked the best was the orange chocolate. So yummy, but not cheap. (2 euros for the 3 pieces).  Half of us ate our yummy delicacies, while the other half spotted a Subway (sandwich shop) across the street and got the...

FLAMENCO DANCING!!!!  The weather was perfect today! Some of us went for a run through the park and it was amazing. We headed off with our lunches to go and visit the hospital at the university of Alcala. It was super cool to see the similarities and differences between our Emergency services and ICU and what it's like in Spain! The nurses are all so friendly, and tons of them speak English. So we loved it!! After our fill, we went back to the university, had lunch, and Ivan, an associate professor there who has like a million degrees and PhDs taught us a class on his research. It was all about care in the field at the end of life. His purpose was to determine what the line is between life and death, and when we stop life saving measures and declare someone dead. And then, if declared dead, how to distinguish them in order to preserve their organs as a donor. In order to donate your organs, you have to between 7-60 here, and there still needs to be good perfusion during transpor...

Today we went to the Centro de Salud de Nuestra Senora del Pilar. Jorge met us at the center and introduced us to a nurse who works there. She was very nice! We sat in a room and she gave us a powerpoint presentation about what community nursing is like in Spain. It was really interesting. She told us that people get to choose which nurse they would like to see. They have 7 different centers that are split into “zonas”. You usually see a nurse that is within your zone but if you want to go to another you can. The nurses usually have set appointments everyday but usually several other people to see. They see about 20 people every day. Each nurse has his or her own office and exam room that is connected. It was super neat! Afterwards we went and did a windshield survey of the area. It is considered one of the lower income neighborhoods in the city. It was neat to see the elderly population and immigrant population walking around. The nurses at the center really emphasized that they have ...

Hola hola hola!!!!!! We had a wonderful day today, as per usual. We started with a discussion about global health indicators (fun fact: milk maids got cow pox, which made them immune to smallpox, which ultimately led to the development of the smallpox vaccine. Smallpox was eradicated in like 1978). Then we booked it to the bus, which was SUPER crowded due to finals at the University de Alcala. Then we met up with our good friends Mar and Sara from yesterday, as well as Lucia and Puri. We then spent a couple hours discussing similarities and differences between nursing culture in our countries (fun fact 2: kids Spain don't leave home until they get married around 32, so there are no university dorms and many kids travel two hours to school and two hours back every day). So then we went to la plaza de Cervantes, which has statues of Miguel de Cervantes, a million billion roses, storks sitting in their nests  on every rooftop , and zillions of old people just people watching and ch...