Panama: Weeks One and Two

The first two weeks in Panama were truly an eye-opening experience. I wished I could have posted this sooner but I haven’t had reliable internet access. Panama is such a beautiful country I love being here, there is always something to learn and the culture is fascinating. The people are very welcoming and eager to collaborate with us, the food is also great. During the first week we toured the city of Panama and unloaded our belongings in our villas at the City of Knowledge. During our tour of the city we traveled to the University of Panama and interacted with other nursing students and learned about their curriculum. The professors as well as the students facilitated our learning tremendously. We traveled to another university (Latina University) and learned about their nursing curriculum through student and faculty presentations. The first week was exciting, most of the time was spent on getting acquainted with our surroundings, learning and touring the historic sites of Panama. Aside from the tourist activities we visited the local hospitals and gathered data to facilitate our learning on prevention of HPV as well as inpatient and outpatient care.

The second week in Panama was in my opinion the highlight of the trip. During one of the hospital visits to Hospital Cecilio Castillero we toured the different wards and learned about inpatient services and the Panamanian health care models. We traveled to an indigenous tribe called Embera, which was quite an experience. Upon leaving the Embera village we traveled to a city called Chitre where we divided into groups and went to the different clinics and administered immunizations including influenza, Hepatitis B, pneumoccoal and tetanus toxoid. One interesting highlight during our clinical experience at Ramiro de Diego clinic was getting the opportunity to perform pap smears which we will never have the opportunity in the States to perform as registered nurses, since this is performed at the Masters level.