We thought we should tell some details from our ward of cardiology. The size of the staff is pretty hard to say. There are so many students and you can’t always say if a nurse is a member of staff or just a student. We think there are about six nurses in a morning shift. It looks like there are twenty nurses all the time because there are so many students in a same shift. Today we counted that there was about 10 nurses/nursing students in one patient room and also seven doctors. It was crazy! You can imagine that it’s hard to see anything because the room is so crowded. We think that the patients feel weird because there are so many eyes staring. There are about 60 patients in the ward staying rooms of one to six persons. The price of a room is different depending of the size so poor people can’t afford a small room for one. Every patient has a shelf beside the bed and a chair for a relative. The nurses clean up the shelves every morning. There are a few patients at the corridor because the ward is so full. The ward is very warm or pretty cold depending on whether the air conditioning works. The building seems a bit dirty and it needs renovating. Also there is a smell in the hospital that seems like gasoline or something… If you take the elevator it takes a long time to get it because it stops at every floor and there are so many people using it. It’s easier to take the stairs.

The patients of the ward are cardiological, so they have a disease that is related to the heart. Most of the patients are over 60 years old. They are at the ward because they have had problems with their heart. Some patients go to CAG (coronaryangiography) and some patients get a pacemaker. Some patients have a heart failure and they don’t need surgical help. The patients come to the ward from out-patient department or from the ER.

In a morning shift (the only shift we do) the nurses administrate the medicines and then they have a report given orally. After that they move from room to room to check the patients. Then they start making the beds and cleaning the patient rooms. After that the nurses wait for i.v. therapy medicines from another floor and then they start giving the medicines and setting the drops. Then the patients go to operations and some of them rest in the afternoon. We think that in the afternoon the nurses do different kind of things depending of the situation. For example if there is a new patient coming or leaving, there’s a lot of paperwork.

Studying.