We began today with another trip out to the Pilar campus of Austral. Yesterday, we learned about Austral’s mission statement which includes the “pursuit of truth” and a “culture of life,” both of which the hospital and university strive to achieve in their everyday actions and activities. Upon arriving today, we went right into a tour of the hospital. Here we were able to see first-hand both how this private hospital runs as well as parts of the emergency rooms, the pediatric floor as well as pediatric oncology and the NICU and ICU. It was astonishing to hear about how Austral handles taking care of patients, especially on the pediatric floors where there is about one nurse working for every three to four patients. I’m not a nursing major, but even I understood that that was a high ratio. Also, Austral does transplants which is crazy since they are a private hospital and work off of money they receive and doesn’t come from the government. I think these are good examples of how Austral embodies the pursuit of truth part of their mission statement. From what I observed and learned about the past two days, I noticed how motivated each Austral worker—whether nurse or administrator—is to advance Austral as a whole and encourage it and everyone included in it to do the best they can with the resources they have. Lastly for pursuit of truth, I know that the hospital has an obligation to help anyone that comes in to the emergency with a dire emergency whether insured or not, but I noticed that the way the Austral nurses in the emergency room talked about this was in a not a big deal way. They are more concerned with making sure the emergency patient is safe before they dive into the insurance coverage.

            Today we also met Austral University students. We had a mixer where we made posters for those poorer families in the community who receive food bags once every 15 days as a means to live. These posters shared positive and encouraging messages for the families receiving the food packages. I think this small action from the hospital really shows and emphasizes Austral’s culture of life. They want everyone in the community to have the most they can while also trying to help them. Austral University Hospital helps to build the community and try to improve the standards of those living here which I feel like fully embodies the culture of life aspect.

            Also, today we sat in on a lego activity in the graduate business school. This activity was a lecture we learned in MCE in activity form about a just in time system with a pull model. It was really cool to see what we learned in a lecture in a visual format. The mixer today was a fun and easy way to get to know the Austral students. All of the ones in my group were nursing majors and it made sense to me as Austral University is laid out very similar to Pitt with UPMC right on and near campus. I was shocked at how good their English was also; they switched between Spanish and English so quickly it made me wish I was better at Spanish! Maybe by the end of these two weeks (twelve days now), I’ll be able to speak—or at least understand—more Spanish!