Christina Bennett Blog 1 3/12-3/13

When I first arrived in Panama after not visiting in 14 years, I was overwhelmed with how much it had changed!  My mother is from Panama and my grandmother and most of my mother's family still lives here, and I used to visit nearly every year from two months old until age 16, but I hadn't been back since.  The city has at least triple the amount of skyscrapers and will eventually have an underground metro rail.  It has less smog, surprisingly, but I've been told that it is attributed to more cars running on gasoline engines instead of diesel.  Overall, the Ciudad de Panama (Panama City-capital) is much more metropolitan than it was 14 years ago.

We spent our first two clinic days at the Centro de Salud de Chitré, a poly-health clinic run on social security funding, and at Hospital Cecilio A. Castillero for women and children, a public hospital.  We worked with Evelyn, a university nursing faculty member and employee at the Centro de Salud, as well as staff nurses.  They were so warm and welcoming to us!  I have had very few preceptors in the U.S. that have been so willing to be “inconvenienced” by students.  I worked first in the fetal monitoring area, then did postpartum follow-up visits with a nurse at the hospital.  Then, I spent the remainder of my first day in the vaccination room.  The Panamanian government vaccine schedule is so thorough and everyone is vaccinated free of charge.  I learned so much that afternoon about using proper technique of drawing up medication and administering the injection.  The nurses in Panama aspirate before delivering the medication in a deep intramuscular injection, something that we do not do in the U.S.  Also, they only use sterile water to clean the site of injection because their protocol states that cleaning the site with alcohol would degrade the vaccine.  Again, this is something quite different than in the U.S. 

On my second day, I spent my morning with the nursing staff in the pediatric area, measuring weight, length, head circumference, and temperature on infants.  I then worked with Dr. Camargo, a pediatric physician on her newborn exams.  She was so thorough and I was more than pleased when she included nearly 15 minutes of teaching on the importance of breastfeeding exclusively until six months of age, a World Health Organization (WHO) recommendation.  I then spent my afternoon in the gynecological area observing Pap smears.

As a previous Anthropology and Latin American Studies major, I was pleasantly surprised by the level of cultural competence displayed by the nurses in at the hospital. When some the indigenous women dar a luz (translations: figurative-give birth; literal-“give light”), they put cotton in their ears and don’t wash their hair for 40 days postpartum because they believe that cold air will get in their ears and prevent their uterus from healing.  They also are encouraged to use their traditional medicines like an herbal tea that they drink to aid in pelvic healing and promote breast milk production.

I am looking forward to the remainder of my week!  I hadn’t realized that we would be learning so much from our nurses.  They are truly a gift to their community.