Meeting of the Minds!

Friday, met with the members of the Rosales hospital administration to discuss priorities in nursing education and hospital equipment needs.  Part of my Masters in Public Health (MPH) project will be to facilitate an exchange with US trainers in critical care areas to do teaching with nurses.  In a hospital of approximately 750 nurses, there are many needs for continuing education and getting enough equipment for all the units.  Rosales treats the sickest patients in the public system and offers the most specialties.  Having many gaps in primary care throughout the country the work done by this hospital is staggering.

Meeting at Rosales, starting from the front, clockwise around the table, Ponce (Nurse Educator), Nurse in charge of bed-board, Mauricio (Rosales doctor), me, Megan (volunteer), Walker (volunteer translator)

Continuing on my investigation, I met with the Ministry of Health today in downtown San Salvador to find out the hospital priorities are from the Ministry's perspective.  They identified critical care training and equipment needs as important for furthering capacity building at Rosales hospital because of the types of patients they receive there.

Nurses have been receiving training in advance life support for children (e.g. PALS) but will be losing the funding for this program in March, making the cost of the course material forbiddingly expensive to provide to the nurses.  They've also been lacking funds for adult advanced life support, severely limiting the number of the nurse's who can participate in the courses.  The hospital is not able to cover this type of training because the course materials are too expensive.  Because the typical Rosales patients need critical care, the hospital staff could greatly benefit from this type of training.

Ministry of Health website (Google translate works great for this)....