Digging deep to provide creative patient care
Sarah Uroza |
In her own words....
Sarah Uroza, assistant professor of pharmacy, is highly involved in community outreach in health care locally, but 2017 was her first year to participate in an international mission trip.
Preparing for this past summer’s trip to Haiti, I knew there would be cultural immersion, but I didn’t realize how much of an educational experience it would be, how much I would have to dig into those things I learned years ago to figure out how to make do with what you have.
The trip provided fun opportunities and challenges that I wasn’t expecting or prepared for, but it was exciting to figure out. It was fun to experience those things myself and to watch our students experience them.
The village, had no electricity and no wifi service. At home, we are so used to looking up doses or looking up comparable references online, but there was no way to do that in Haiti. So you really had to use and rely solely on what you have previously learned.
At one point, we wanted to administer some antibiotics for a child. The antibiotics were required to be mixed with 83 milliliters of water. But we had nothing to measure the water. It took us a few minutes to figure out that the liquid ibuprofen we had with us had dosing cups on top of the bottle. So we grabbed those and collected 15 milliliters of water over and over in a water bottle until we got close to 83 milliliters. Then we marked the water level in the water bottle and that became our measuring tool for the antibiotics.
That’s just one example of the kind of creative, on-your-feet thinking we had to employ every day in Haiti.
Sometimes you just don’t have the medication you need, but the patients were grateful for anything you can provide. One student who went to Haiti last year remembered that many people came in with back pain and muscle pain because they do such hard labor. We provided ibuprofen, but supplies are always limited. The student asked her sister, a physical therapist to come on the 2017 trip, and she began teaching patients physical therapy exercises they can do at home to relieve their pains.
It was so interesting to watch the Haitian children we served. When we gave them a piece of candy, like a Jolly Rancher, they would all share it among themselves. They have so little there, the kids want to make sure that all their friends get to experience their good fortune. That was really sweet to watch.