An Adventure at Loma Linda University Children's Hospital

An Adventure at LLU 

During this valuable 2 months, large amount of information came in my brain so fast within so limited time — the more I learned, the more ignorant I found myself was. Being greedy, I wish that I could have 3 heads and 6 eyes, trying hard to grasp every opportunity to make each moment count.

So what did I do and learn in this precious two months?

I opened my eyes and ears to learn

During everyday's round, I paid full attention to catch up everything, discussed treatment strategy, and compared the differences between two hospitals. I have got to watch their neuroprotection for tiny babies, and understand the idea of “whole baby care”. I even went to their high risk clinic, and estimated for out comings. I participated in lectures for resident training, and small classes for fellowship training, and compared different levels of the training. What's more, I also passed the BLS and NRP class, which includes self-learning, online exam and offline exam. The online exam was simulated scenarios of resuscitation, which was really cool. What I found most important were their team work practice, leadership training and communication. 

Their teaching system was well designed. Beyond the guidelines and lectures, there was a simulation center, which was super cool. They had many rooms with different scenes, like NICU, PICU, ER, OR…And those room looked exactly the same with the real ones, which were all fully equipped. During all the equipment, the only thing you can tell was the cameras on the sailing were controlled by the control center. They got a teacher controlling the scenario, and also nurses cooperating to train the residents one by one. They were really spoiled with so many resources. 

I opened my heart to feel

We were arranged to attend a tour of the Child Life Program for 2 days, which totally changed my mind. I used to think that Child Life is all about tools and game room, which was proved to be totally wrong. The basic idea of Child Life was to care — care for the little ones, care for their thoughts and feeling, and also care for the whole family. In the ER, they had specialists who can comfort the kids, explain what they have been through and provide them with toys and games. They also had iBooks to tell them stories about and the preparation and the process of the operations of teddy bears. And they had cartoons about the human body, and pictures of MRI/CT machines. So the patients would be accustomed to the circumstance in the hospital and understood that we were helping them. 

It is wonderful to feel the caring spirits. We also have a team of Child Life in our own hospital. There are  so many things we can change and we can do to improve in our daily work immediately, for example, our attitude to care and comfort, our pre-exam/procedure education, our ways of diagnosis and treatment teaching.

I opened my mind to explore

Everything looks so different to me, which means lots of different ideas are emerging and sparkling all the time. It is easy to get to all the different resources online, and even easier to explore different fields of science.  If someone asks me about what I learned here, I will say that before I came here, some of my nice colleagues told me the vegetarian food here was horrible, and gave me lots of good advice. However, after I tried as many different things as I could, and finally, I was glad to find that it was not so bad to eat with no meat. Then I realized that we should never shut the door to anything before trying. We should always take advice, but also, try everything.

This was the most fulfilling two months. I got to know what I was capable of. I got to know the potentialities and possibilities waiting in the future. At the end of the day, I would finally step on the plane back, satisfied and confident. Now, I'm ready, to make the world a better place.