We have been practicing in surgical ICU for three days now and next week we’ll have one day and then that practice is over. ICU in Ren Ji hospital is in building 7, the 3^rd floor. There are about 25 patients in the ward and one nurse per three patients. A lot more compared to Finland. There are patients who have been in the ward for years, for example there is a patient who has been there for four years. The relatives want to keep him alive and the doctors allow it even though the patient is in a vegetative state and has no brain function. In Finland that kind of patient would not be in ICU, probably they would have stopped the respiratory machine after few months. The nurses told us that this is a big problem in hospitals all over China because the patients who really need a bed won’t get it. There should be a ward or nursing home for patients who are in a vegetative state. Our nurse supervisor, Van, has been really nice and his English is really good. He has been telling us about the respiratory machine and ABP (arterial blood pressure). Another nurse told us about basic nursing in the ward and about their work in general. For example the nurses have this system where the head nurse evaluates them monthly. If a nurse does some mistake, the head nurse will take some points from the nurse. When you lose five points, you will lose 50 yuans from your salary. The nurses who haven’t done mistakes in a year, will get the money from other nurses who have done mistakes. We think it’s a crazy system and the nurses feel stressed about it. We think that if a nurse does a mistake, she won’t tell anyone and the patient can get hurt.

Yesterday we went to a nursing home with other exchange students and there was a 10^th anniversary show of the nursing home. After that we went to see the Oriental Pearl TV Tower. It’s the tower in the Pudong area and it’s height is 468 meters. We visited the sightseeing floor, where you can walk over the floor that you can see through. It was in 259 meters and it was really scary! We also went to 350 meters, where the sights were amazing. It was a beautiful day so we could see really far away. Also we went to a roller coaster which was in 90 meters. It was weird – a roller coaster is a sightseeing tower. It was nice though. The Pearl Tower was a really nice experiment and we both enjoyed it a lot.

Sight from the tower.

The Space Module at 350 meters.