We started our practical training yesterday, on Monday morning around 9.30 a.m. The school bus took us to the Ren Ji University Hospital where we will do our practical training during these three months. Ms Lucy, our tutor from school, was at the hospital waiting for us and she guided us to the surgical building. There we had an introduction of the hospital and we were divided into two groups: neurosurgery and cardiology. We two, Emmi and Olli went to another building which included internal diseases. We are in 5^th floor of that building for a month, in the cardiology ward. The staff told us about the work in their ward and they spoke pretty good English. Unfortunately most of the reporting and communication between other workers is in Chinese so we are a little bit lost sometimes. The staff is really nice and they are explaining us things we don’t understand. The patients don’t speak English at all so communication is a problem. All we can say is “nihao” and “chao shang hao” which mean hello and good morning. Thank god we have a two hour lunch break!

The families of the patients do most of the basic care – bathing, eating etc. The nurses just make beds and clean up the room. They also check how patients are doing. Today the nurses who guide us showed how to make patient’s bed correctly and how to place the chair next to the bed (really weird). In the afternoon all of us Finnish students watched how a nurse measured patient’s blood sugar. It was a bit funny because it’s a daily routine in Finland and it was basic stuff in our previous practical trainings. Few of us saw the nurses doing i.v. therapy and we got to help them a little. We have got a feeling that we don’t know how to do things in the right way because the nurses seem to think we don’t know anything. A guess they don’t know much about health care in Finland. We noticed that some things are different from the things in Finland. For example a nurse put hand disinfection after she put on the gloves so she wore the same gloves with every patient. We also have to use a mask every time we are in a patient room. We are confused about this training because it is so different and weird, but luckily the staff is nice and they try to help us much as they can.

Ren Ji hospital, the cardiac unit. From the left our tutor in the ward, Miika, Outi and Olli.