CICU and TELEMETRY NURSE ORIENTATION

Part of working on a Medical Mission of this magnitude is knowing what we are doing and how to impart that information to our own Healing Hearts Northwest (HHNW) Nursing staff and then to the King Faisal Hospital (KFH) Nursing staff.



To this end, HHNW CICU and PICU nurses have had 2 hours of ventilator training and the CICU, PICU and Telemetry nurses have had 3 hours of Pediatric Congenital Open Heart Training and also a 2 hour Orientation Course on what to expect and how to function at KFH in Kigali, Rwanda. That is a lot of unpaid classroom hours, which gives a whole new meaning to volunteers.

Add on top of this, the 5 HHNW staff that plan on presenting during our full day Cardiac Education Day for the KFH nurses and staff. They will be teaching Ethics, Blood Product Administration, Pediatric Congenital Heart Surgery, ECG Rhythm Interpretation and Coumadin Pharmacology. I am telling you, we have some amazing staff volunteers.

As mentors, we plan to implement a more formalized documentation system of whom and how we have mentored the KFH nurses. Hopefully, this will assist us in future Medical Missions, deciphering who has been trained and is capable of recovering Open Hearts on their own and who still needs full training or just a little refresher.

This is no easy task for any of us, on either end. Traveling clear across the globe, to a foreign country in a foreign city and still having our wits about us to teach appropriately. And, on their end, coming to work one day, seeing all of us Muzungus (white people) and being paired up with one of us to learn as much as possible through a language barrier.

The most fascinating aspect of the above is that it actually works! It is amazing how universal sickness, hospitals, nursing and charades actually is. Unbelievably, we all seem to communicate in the same way about the same subjects or ideas. Although we may struggle to find words or props to show what we mean, somehow each party gets their point across.

And it works because we have such amazing nurses volunteering their own funds to pay for their trip, volunteering their own vacation time and volunteering all of their years of expertise. Sometimes we do not realize what a plethora of useful information we hold within ourselves. My hope is for each HHNW and KFH nurse to find and share and rejoice in each other's knowledge, for this is true collaboration.












So wish us all godspeed in our success, for this will bring King Faisal Hospital one step closer to performing their own Open Heart Surgeries with their own Open Heart Program with wonderfully capable nurses and staff.