A Short Preview of My Apprenticeship.

 

This is the subcentro I am volunteering in for the next six months as a Nursing Assistant.

 

This is me in the subcentro with my over-sized lab coat which advertises a medication that probably has something to do with the urinary system. (I am investing in scrubs in the near future.)

 

All of the histories for the patients are paper.

 

There are over 12,000 of them and that number is rapidly growing. My job includes shuffling through the thousands of histories to search for the patients' history and to return the histories that the doctor(s) saw that day back to their proper place. 

Each of those binders holds 200 histories.

 

I sit behind that nice little window for a good chunk of the day and sort through histories, greet patients, and do all of the paperwork that needs to be done before the patient sees the doctor (which simply includes finding the correct history or making a new history if the patient is new to the clinic).

 

I check vitals before the patient sees the doctor(s) -- height, weight, blood pressure, etc.

 

 I also get to do cool things like cleaning wounds, taking out stitches and assististing/observing the doctor(s).

 

(Want to see the before and after to this patient? Check it out here.)

I´m getting lots of practice doing what I love, learning new skills and learning new ways of doing things (for example, in my clinic, we don´t get sterile gauze in packages on a regular basis, so we fold the gauze inside of paper and we put them into a machine which sterilizes them).



Next on my Ecuadorian adventure: Vacation to the beach - Video and Photos