16TH OCTOBER 2018
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.
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