VUSN International Activity 2015

Please enjoy the excellent work of our VUSN students who completed the Nicaragua Course! Students were immersed in two clinics performing BP screenings, glucose screenings and giving nutrition, diabetes and hypertension counseling. Students also spent time fitting patients for reading glasses and over 500 pairs were handed out to patients. 

• Diabetes Education in Nicaragua: An Interprofessional Patient Empowerment Project
• Hypertension Screening and Education in Managua and Granada
• Nutrition Education in Nicaragua 

VUSN International Activity 2014

In 2014, VUSN faculty and staff participated in several diverse global health activities. 

• Dr.  Mary Jo Gilmer spent 2 weeks in Nicaragua conducting research on death and bereavement.
• Instructors  Michael Gooch and  Deanna Pilkenton spent 7 days in Nicaragua as leading faculty for the Nicaragua Global Health Immersion course.
• Deanna Pilkenton (NM instructor) and two nurse midwifery students spent 10 days in the Dominican Republic with Project Hope, working in antepartum, GYN and Post-partum clinics.
• Dr. Terry Witherington took 4 students to Haiti for a week-long medical mission trip.
• Three VUSN students participated in international project as part of Project Pyramid; Tsurumi Hisae (Botswana), Kathryn Fischer (Guatemala) and Maggie Hume (Cambodia).
• VUSN graduates Carly Prentice (FNP) and Jim Yates (ANP) were selected for the 2014 Nurse in Residence program in Kenya. They spent 12 weeks working in clinics with Kenyan nurses in the Central Province.

Each spring, VUSN’s Pediatric Primary Care Nurse Practitioner Director Terry Witherington invites students on a medical mission trip to Haiti.  Several of the students who participated in 2014 shared their experiences in hopes of providing insight into this life-changing experience.

Essien Ekom

Sitting in my seat on the flight back to Miami, looking out of my window and watching Haiti grow smaller and smaller, my mind wandered and thought about all the events that had led up to the previous week.  The financial support and prayers from my family, friends, coworkers and church family had all come together to make everything fall into place. At every turn I was blown away by how seamlessly things happened, and it put my heart and mind at ease that this was the right time, the right place, and the right group to share this experience with.

More than anything, the unspoken connection I felt with Haiti was overwhelming. The people, language, food, and beautiful landscape reminded me of my own Nigerian heritage. So many of the people who lived in the small mountain villages we travelled to had never met an American who looked like them and shared a similar cultural background. This connection allowed me to open myself more fully to the parents and children I had the privilege of caring for during each of our clinics during the week. 

I came away from our weeklong trip not only more confident in my clinical abilities, but renewed and strengthened spiritually and emotionally. I could not have chosen a more remarkable group of women to have shared this experience with; through evenings spent battling to keep the insect populations at bay in our bungalows, to playing hand games with children between clinic visits, and spending every evening reflecting on our purpose and work during the trip, each memory will stay with me for a lifetime.
“While we do our good works let us not forget that the real solution lies in a world in which charity will have become unnecessary.” 
― Chinua Achebe, Antihills of the Savannah

Jennifer Holmes Eaton

When I had the opportunity to go to Haiti, I said yes immediately. Medical mission work has always been a passion of mine, and I was thrilled to have the opportunity to go and work in an area of such high need with a pediatric population. In some ways, I was prepared for the conditions awaiting us, since I had done mission trip in the mountain villages in Jamaica. I wasn’t surprised by eating goat for dinner, chasing lizards out of our bungalow, or dodging falling mangoes while we were studying under a tree. The nursing program has taught us all to be flexible, so setting up a clinic in a backyard or a small community church was actually pretty straightforward. And with wonderful translators, and a couple years of academic French under my belt, we were able to converse relatively easily with our families, despite the language and cultural barriers.

In other ways, I was completely surprised by the lessons that awaited us all in Haiti. When we prepared for the trip, we studied tropical diseases, such as malaria and dengue fever, with the thought that we would see more of those disease processes than anything else. In fact, the opposite was true. We had one child who presented with kwashiorkor, a disease of poverty that is prevalent in Haiti. Otherwise, our children all had diagnoses we had seen in the States, most notably scabies, tinea capitis, and ear infections.  But our interactions with the families were much more than simply getting a history and prescribing an antibiotic. For one thing, our pharmaceutical resources were relatively limited, so teaching took on a renewed importance. And often the teaching had to be modified for the culture and the resources of our families. I talked with a mom about treating her four month old’s constipation, and had to think quickly of a substitute for apple or prune juice. I counseled a teenager on proper lifting techniques for carrying water. I talked with families about healthy diets and increasing protein intake with the resources they had available. Throughout our time working with families, what struck me the most was not the differences but the similarities between the families I’ve cared for in the US and the families in Haiti. When I was talking with a grandmother, I joked about the insatiable appetite of teenage boys, and received a big grin in response. And when I offered my stethoscope to the kids who were waiting to be seen, the excitement in their eyes was the same as that of the kids I’ve seen in clinics everywhere.

Terry Witherington always says that if you can treat kids on a mountaintop in Haiti, you can do it anywhere. In my case, I think the experiences I had caring for children in Haiti are what will inform and color my practice for many years as I enter into primary care. Being in Haiti taught me to think on my feet, and to always be mindful of the family’s culture and resources before creating a treatment plan. Working in clinic with translators and other students also taught me the importance of functioning as part of a team. Some of the best advice I was able to give parents came from the other pediatric NP students. Most of all, caring for children in Haiti was a renewing and restorative experience, one that gave me the confidence to care for patients independently, and one that has reaffirmed my desire to make medical mission work a regular aspect of my practice.