Baodi | UCI iMedEd International

Friday, July 20 was our last day at the 108 hospital and our last day of our UCI China/Vietnam summer experience.

I will be the first of the three of us to return to the States. Looking back, I can?t help but smile at the incredible opportunity to work with such amazing doctors. Words cannot express the warm, fuzzy feeling I felt in Baodi, in Cangzhou, and in 108. I would like to thank the donors of the Change the World Grant, Dr. Maguire, Mr. Gold, Warren and the iMeded team, all the doctors of Baodi, Cangzhou, Tianjiin Medical University, and 108, Ms. Su, Max, and my family in Vietnam and Japan for an amazing summer.

First I want to reflect a bit on my time in Baodi. Every person I talked to at Tianjin Medical University had no idea where Baodi was. And that is what makes it special. It is considered to be in the countryside. The people in Baodi are so sweet and nice. After only two weeks, our mentors, both the doctors we shadowed and the doctors who work in the education and technology department, became our family.

In Baodi, Xu Lao Shi and Wang Lao Shi arranged our Baodi experience. I had the opportunity to see numerous surgical procedures from an appendectomy to an orthopedic surgery for a broken tibia to a mastectomy to the anastomosis of the radial artery and cephalic vein to Caesarian sections. In the ICU, my mentor patiently taught me about each patient?s condition, how to read their EKGs, and how to interpret their lab values as it relates to respiratory and kidney function. In addition to rotating throughout the hospital, we were taken to secondary/community clinics and village clinics.

The KouDong Community Clinic is much smaller than the Baodi Hospital. There are 26 doctors who work there as well as blah number of beds. The clinic has two floors. The first floor is primary care. The second floor is inpatient. One wing of the clinic is the TCM area where many patients come for acupuncture, cupping, and herbal medicine. It was very interesting to watch the doctors perform acupuncture on a patient who suffered a stroke a couple of weeks ago and then to see later that patient in the rehabilitation room for physical therapy. There is also a separate space for public health services such as vaccinations and patient education, especially for pregnant women. One room in this area that impressed me was the waiting room for the children because in the room was a television that would play public health messages to educate the kids as they wait. One more thing that made an impression on me was paper medical records. The records are now being recorded electronically but the clinic is in the process of transferring all the paper files. Some of the patient files had a very obvious red, blue or green sticker which corresponded to patients with a medical history of diabetes, hypertension, and stroke.

The village clinic in the neighborhood of KouDong serves about 2,000 people. It is a very basic primary care clinic with four rooms: one for the doctor, one therapy room with four chairs and two beds, one for pharmacy, and one small room for the computer. At this clinic, the doctor often makes house calls. It also turns out that this village clinic is connected to the KouDong clinic system. The technology staff at Baodi told us that in five years, they hope to connect all the medical records of all the clinics in the Baodi area. It makes me wonder the possibility of using the iPad once it is connected to the medical records. The doctor could download their patient file, go out and make a house call, record the information, and then return to the clinic to upload the new file to the system.

When we were not working in the hospital or touring the healthcare system, we wandered around China with our mentors. We visited the Tombs of the emperors from the Qing Dynasty, climbed the Great Wall, relaxed in the famous Baodi hotsprings, ate dinner with our mentors and their family, and walked around the town to various parks.

We also had the chance to interact with the public health students from Tianjin Medical Univeristy who had spent a year in Baodi for their rotations. As Eric already mentioned, medical/public school starts right after high school so these students who were second years were 20/21 years old. The three of us were invited to their talent show in which Eric performed as well as the end of the year dinner celebration.

I am very happy to have met such wonderful people in Baodi. I am very thankful for all the meals we shared, all the gan bei, and all the comfortably silent moments I shared with each of them as we were lost in translation. It?s pretty amusing to think about the strong bond we share with our mentors.

After two weeks in Baodi, we moved to Tianjin to visit other clinics and get a glimpse of the healthcare system in a large city setting. On July 5, we were invited to attend the TMU graduation ceremony and as luck would have it, we ran into the dean of Baodi hospital, Wang Yuan Zhang, Xu Lao Shi, and Wang Lao Shi. I will never forget how happy I felt to see them even for a few minutes. Wang Yuan Zhang, who cares greatly for all of his students, told us to keep Saturday night (our last night in China) free so that he can come back with Xu Lao Shi to say goodbye. Keep in mind that Baodi is 2 hours away from Tianjin!

On Saturday night, Wang Yuan Zhang and all of our mentors, Xu Lao Shi, Wang Lao Shi, Zhang Lao Shi, Men Lao Shi, and Chen Lao Shi surprised us in Tianjin! It was such a sweet moment. I will never forget their love and care.

Source: http://sites.uci.edu/imededinternational/2012/07/27/baodi/

actuary elon musk al sharpton fox mole manson bubba watson recent earthquakes