490 Blog 5

This past week, our group visited the Santo Spirito Hospital in Rome. This hospital is the oldest in Europe, dating back to the year 727. It was interesting to see the setup of an Italian hospital and to learn about how things are done here. It was also fun to pretend to be a doctor for a day, since we were required to wear scrubs while in the hospital.
We began our tour of the hospital in a classroom where Italian nursing students are taught. The hospital is also a school of nursing, and their courses seem to be designed in a similar way to the courses in America. We were told some of the facts about the school, and I was surprised to hear that nurses are in abundance in Italy as opposed to the shortage in the U.S.
The director of the hospital spoke to us for a while as well, and he gave us some insight into the ups and downs of the socialized health care system in Italy. This was very fascinating since the U.S. has recently passed new health care legislation. One of the standout comments that the director made was that the hospital struggles to balance cost with income. Based on the problems he pointed out in the current system, it seemed obvious that this struggle was caused by universal health care. However, he did not seem completely against the system, he was only aware of its flaws. For example, he said that the general practitioners in Italy are not usually very knowledgeable. Because of this, they will often send patients to the hospital when they do not necessarily need hospital care. In order to do this, the practitioners will send the patients to the hospital in the middle of the night (when the practitioner is unavailable to see patients), thus cheating the system and “sneaking” patients into the hospital. Overall, the system sounded very complicated, and it was even more difficult to grasp because the director spoke broken English. Nonetheless, it was a very interesting discussion.
After this introduction, we began our tour of the hospital. We walked past rooms where surgeries were carried out, and we saw the care units where post-surgery patients and other in-patients were kept. The rooms in this section were color-coded based on which patients required more or less care from the nursing staff. It was here that were introduced to an American patient who was also a college student. He was from Arizona State University, and was visiting Rome on his spring break. He had been robbed of his money, beaten, and stabbed multiple times. I am guessing that he it was late at night, alcohol was involved, and he was in a bad area of the city.
We also saw a section of the hospital where patients with cardiac problems were kept. The monitoring of these patients was pretty intense, and our group had to split up and take turns viewing the room so that we did not disturb or alarm the patients. After this we saw the labor wing of the hospital. We went through each room that a pregnant woman would go through during the course of giving birth. We were even able to see the room where the actual births take place, which was very interesting. We were also able to see a couple of Italian babies before we left, which got everyone pretty googly-eyed.
In the end, I found our trip to the hospital much more interesting than I had anticipated.