Gavin Maxwell

Public Health Institute: Faces for The Future Program Planning

Week 1: This week was spent mainly on practical skills commonly used in the field of medicine, such as inserting a needle and casting a patient. During the first half of the first day we focused on inserting needles into dummy patient's arms. During the second half of the day we listened to a lecture by local Physicians Assistant, which basically introduced the program to the field. The first day opened my eyes to medical profession that don’t require you to earn a doctorate. Throughout the rest of the week a practical lesson and a lecture really stood out. First the practical lesson was on applying casts. This lesson had you team up with a partner and apply a cast to their left forearm. I was teamed up with a boy by the name of Coby. He had a lot of trouble applying the cast so my arm ended up looking, as the lesson put it, “slightly tumoured” and had to be cut off because Coby and I couldn’t remove it by hand. Thankfully, the cast I applied turned out fairly well. Second, one lecture really stood out to me. A local doctor came in to talk about practicing medicine outside of “developed” countries. I found this particularly interesting because of the way he talked about relief efforts. When donations of money go into buying equipment for a group of people much of the time the equipment is used for the wrong purpose. For example when a nonprofit he worked with donated a large number of water purifiers to a small tribe in Cuba the tribe began using the purifiers as ovens instead of their intended purpose.
 

Week 2: This week in contrast to the previous week focused less on physical health and more on mental health. Two practical exercises really stood out to me. One involved a number of actors told to act as patients and the other was a visit to a famous hospice care facility in George Mark House. The actors were very powerful in their depictions of patients. Some were wrestlers with anorexia, some were deaf mothers we had to convince to get their child hearing aids, others still was a 13 year old girl we had to convince to get an abortion. Each of these was individually powerful but together they were heart wrenching, for me this exercise ended in tears. I don’t think there will be a point in my life where I forget the feeling of asking someone to give up their way of thinking and in some cases their way of life. On the other hand going to George Mark House was dealing with people who had already given up on their way of life and life altogether. We met with thirteen kids that day and we knew that every single one of them was dying. These kids, some as young as five years old, were going to die.

Week 3: Week 3 put me into a more traditional internship position. Unfortunately this was not as exciting as the first two weeks as my only jobs consisted of getting coffee and pushing papers.