We started off this week with the Needs Finding Short course Prof. Howard! I was excited for what this would entail as being able to observe a clinical environment in action is something few people outside of medical professionals get to see. After a short introduction to Needs Finding and ethnography that Ms. Howard gave us at the Mini auditorium in the School of Electrical Engineering of UCR (my alma mater❤️) we were off to visit the observation sites.
The first one for our group was the Hospital for Geriatrics and Gerontology, commonly known as Hospital Blanco Cervantes, where we were accompanied by Javier Moya who is the engineer in charge of the machines at the hospital. There we were given a tour of the facilities and the machines at their disposal, we saw the equipment from the physical therapy section, the bed ward, endoscopy, OR, medical imaging section (we even got to see a CT scan being performed!) and ophthalmology. Overall it’s what I expected to see in a public hospital but I’m still glad that Javier was able to educate us on how the machines work and the problems that they face.
Our second visit was Hospital Clínica Bíblica where we were allowed into the ER early in the morning, due to it being so early and it being an ER section in a private hospital it was fairly quiet and calm. The staff showed us their up-to-date equipment and informed us of how they usually work. It was interesting for me to see that even with how many resources Clínica Bíblica has, the staff still struggled with a clumsy and unstable software for their documentation, though it still was more advanced than what you would find in a public hospital. From there we went to the OR where, although some of us weren’t allowed inside, we were able to witness a polyp hysterectomy. In the surgery theatre next to us they were performing a C-section we got to peek into for a bit. Watching surgeries being performed like this was eye opening as to how casual some of them are, though it makes since this is everyday work for the staff performing them.
On the last day of the course we visited the new Dentistry faculty at UCR. Though dentistry has never been something thrilling for me, it was fascinating the kind of equipment that they had there, though because of
their limited availability a lot of old-school methods and tech were used. They showed us both old-school labs for how dentistry used to be done and more modern labs with technology applications I never even considered were useful to dentistry until today. Finally, we met back at the School of Electrical Engineering where with the help of Prof. Howard we crafted Needs Statements from our observations at the clinical visits. The summer program is shaping up to be a really engrossing experience and I’m really glad everyone in the cohort is so nice and engaging!