Service Learning - A Day on 10 South, Sukriti Kaur

1.  The event I did was volunteer as a Health Scholar at Providence Hospital on May 28th, 10:30 am  to 2:30 pm. I volunteered on the floor 10 South, a medical surgical floor, at Colby Campus in     Everett. The coordinator in charge for this floor is Karli Daniels and she can be reached at, prmce10s@copehealthscholars.org 

2. The organization that sponsored this event is Cope Health Scholars. The purpose of Cope Health Scholars is to provide people that are interested in the medical field to gain patient care experience. Cope Health Scholars offers opportunities to any individuals interested in further learning and wanting to gain more knowledge that will help them, no matter what step they are in their career path. 

3. I have many duties when I'm volunteering at Providence Hospital. Some of the duties I do are taking vital signs of patients, changing bed linen, walking patients, discharging patients, etc.

 

This is a picture of me with one of the CNA's that I worked with on following day. 

This is a picture of the floor sign.

4. Volunteering at Providence Hospital has made me realize how much volunteers at a hospital can affect the healing of patients. The staff members at a hospital have duties to do. For example, surgeons, doctors, nurses, physical therapist, respiratory therapist, etc, all have duties to fulfill and are running around all around helping trying to help patients recover physically and mentally. Everything is a rush at a hospital. There are thousands of people to help and I feel like that's where volunteers come in. Volunteers take the time to sit down and have patient interaction. Knowing all the important subjects such as chemistry, biology, anatomy, physiology is important but having compassion towards the patients in necessary. I realized that through volunteering. The nurses and doctors get so busy and caught up with their jobs that the patients who have been admitted for a long time start to feel like a burden, even to ask for the smallest things like a warm blanket. When I used to round on the patients and check if they needed anything, most of the time they wouldn't but they would ask who I was, and thank me for my time and service to helping patients like them. Lots of the patients feel lonely sometimes too since family isn't there always and so I would take the time to sit down with a patient and just talk to them. I could tell the really appreciated that and felt welcomed and important. Even though I was just a volunteer, I felt like I was giving a lot to the hospital by interacting with patients and making them feel welcomed and not like a burden. One of the tasks I have to do a lot as a health scholar is take vital signs. This relates to human anatomy because you learn about normal heart rate, respiration count, pulse, temperature, all items that are vital to human survival. All these vital signs work together to keep a human body running, just like all the organ systems work together with one another to help keep a body functioning. Human biology is interdisciplinary because it's not just one core concept. Biology is from the cellular level to a whole organism. All the human organs interact with one another to keep a body functioning properly. 

Questions: 

1) How much plastic/supplies/materials are wasted or thrown away due to excessive safety precaution measurements? 

2) How many patients are admitted on average in one day in each different department of the hospital (ER, Surgery, Renal, etc.)? 

3) How often do surgeons come on the floor and for what cases?

4) How much electricity and water is used daily to run the laundry facility?