I just finished an amazing week of Medical Brigades with my group from NYU and we truly have reason to celebrate: on our third day of brigades we broke the record of most patients seen on a single day with an astonishing 1307 patients. However, the truly amazing thing was that my team, aided by a doctor and two nurses from Duke, was so devoted and worked so hard and efficiently that everybody thought we had “only” seen around 800 patients. Our brigade was a well-oiled machine: local volunteers handled patient intake, filling out name and age on the patient sheet. At triage, students take vitals and conduct a brief interview to determine what ailments the patient has and which doctor would thus be best suited to treat the patient. Next, students take patients into the exam room, where doctors who are mostly aided by student translators, examine the patients and write prescriptions. Ordinarily after that it would be on to the pharmacy, but this brigade we incorporated the newly designed Health Promotion Disease Prevention station into our brigade. A volunteer would stop patients on their way to the pharmacy and collect their patient sheets, asking them to listen to the “charla” while students filled their prescriptions. The charla is a 10-minute public health workshop that focuses on issues like what germs are, how they spread and how to prevent it, as well as the importance of treating drinking water to make it potable and how to accomplish that. After the charla, patients were sent to the pharmacy, where their prescriptions were ready for pick-up. In this highly efficient manner, we managed to see 1307 patients in roughly 7 hours. Truly an amazing experience!
Aug 15, 2009 5:02:59 AM |
I just finished an amazing week of Medical Brigades with my group from NYU and we truly have reason to celebrate: on our third day of brigades we broke the record of most patients seen on a single day with an astonishing 1307 patients. However, the truly amazing thing was that my team, aided by […]
