Today started off with an hour bus ride over to a private university called Austral. The school is connected with its own hospital, kind of how Pitt has UPMC. We had a lecture with the chairman of quality and safety of the hospital, Dr. Marcelo Pellizzari. He talked with us about many things including an overview of how the hospital works, how it responded to covid and an increase in population, as well as the hospitals 5 main goals and focuses. These 5 focuses were patient centered care, workers needs, quality and safety, efficiency, and innovation. I found this really interesting to listen to because you could see that this hospital really cares about improving itself.

Now Austral is a private hospital just like the Santorio de los Arcos. Both of these hospitals are HMO’s which means that they are an insurance plan as well as a hospital. These hospitals were pretty similar in the way that they delivered care for patients. They have the newest technology and use the most up to date practices. Both of the hospitals also face some of the same challenges as well. This includes things like a lack of a lot of primary care and nursing/staffing shortages. These things make it hard for them to deliver the highest quality care. Having a nursing and staff shortage causes for these facilities to not be able to care for as many patients as they would like, so in many cases people have to be turned away and wait very long times to seek help from specialists.

After the lectures and tour of the hospital we got to go and visit a hospice center for people of the Austral hospital. This facility had less than 20 rooms and was very quiet and peaceful. We got to hear some awesome stories that truly showed how much the staff care for the patients. One story was about a woman who loved horses and her last wish was to be able to see and pet one again. Part of the goal from the staff is to not add days to the patients lives, but to instead add life to their days which I think is very beautiful. So, this staff organized with locals who owned a horse and prepared everything for it to be brought outside for the woman to see one one last time!

We ended our day with lunch and a student mixer which was my favorite part. We got to talk to students from Austral and work on a simple case study to compare how the U.S. vs. Argentina would respond to a healthcare related problem. There were two girls in my group and one was a nursing major and the other was an international relations major. It was very interesting to learn about the similarities and differences between our programs and schools. Overall it was a great day and I can’t wait for tomorrow. Bye guys!