Today we went to the Birmingham Children’s Hospital, which works in a trio with Birmingham Women’s Hospital as well as their mental health facility. But before that we had to get up and go to breakfast. Instead of walking into the breakfast place and picking a random spot like we normally do there was a line to wait in that I completely missed which was slightly embarrassing. I was able to quickly bounce back and start the day on the correct foot again. We quickly met up by the hotel door at 9 and hopped in taxis to get to our destination. Right before it was time for us to go in we stopped at a cute little coffee shop to fuel up for the long day ahead of us.
Going to the children’s hospital was a super cool and special experience. Right now, I believe that I might want to work in a pediatric field, and seeing it today definitely confirmed some of my thoughts. As soon as we arrived at the hospital, we were greeted by a friendly team of four nurses that brought us upstairs and began to speak about the hospital and their roles in the healthcare team.
After a brief talk and rules briefing, we took off in two groups to get a tour of the hospital and a lot of it wards/areas. My group started by visiting the pediatric Oncology and Hematology department. Walking through our first ward was so cool. It was so well thought out and the consideration put into it to provide spaces for everyone was something beyond what I could’ve ever thought of. There were rooms that had 4 beds, cubicles for 1 patient that might need to be isolated, multiple play areas for certain age ranges, nurses’ stations, and even a quiet room that the nurses could use to break bad news to the patient’s family if that were to unfortunately have to happen. They also had massive whiteboards all over the walls showing the goals of the ward, patient information for the medical teams, important phone extensions, and so much more. These whiteboards seem like something that could be very beneficial for hospitals at Pittsburgh as my other friends on the trip that work in the hospitals at home said that they don’t currently have these. Unlike Pittsburgh they still chart on paper here. While walking through this first ward I noticed massive binders and folders worth of patient charts. This is the only thing I didn’t enjoy about the hospital because I think the online charts are much more effective. But the nurses did say that they were trying to be fully online by mid 2025.
Later on in the day we went to tour the pediatric emergency department. Similarly to the United States and the emergency departments back in Pittsburgh the emergency departments runs on a triage system. The most critical patients get a red tag, then orange, then yellow, and the patients with the highest health quality get a green tag that implies they can wait the longest when waiting for a doctor. Similar to home the emergency departments are currently extremely back up with not enough beds to tend to everyone in a timely manner. Children’s Hospital here is on bed lock meaning there’s no beds open which really backs everything up. One thing in this department that I noticed was different is that they had many little sections compared to many emergency departments in the United States. They had a room for resuscitations, general non-life threatening sickness, a room to put casts on broken bones, an x-ray room, another section where people go after their general practitioner referred them to the emergency room and more. At home it seems like everyone gets a bed in the same big unit and only get moved if it’s absolutely needed.
Finally, we learned about lots of little special teams that float around the different wards and units. While both countries have these special teams, it seems like they might not have the same exact ones. In the United States there’s lots of special teams for things like cardiac arrests and other emergency situations. Here there lots of teams that work on preventing things like cardiac arrets before they even happen. The special teams in the UK are usually highly trained nurses that have taken a 6 month prescribing class, something that a nurse cannot do in the United States. Its 6 intense months of learning how to properly decide what to prescribe to who and what medications are appropriate for certain situations. This allows for nurses to because highly specialized employees that can staff these special teams, something that can’t happen in the United States unless a team of nurse practitioners is put together which would be a large waste of highly valuable people.
I loved going to the Birmingham Children’s Hospital today because I believe it gave me a good insight into what my future could look like. I got to have lots of cool one on one conversations with lots of nurses that shared personal stories and experiences that you can’t hear anywhere else. It provided a lot of perspective for me as it opened my eyes to how tough the day to day job is for a nurse, but if anything this made me want to work harder to be the best nurse I can be. Listening to how passionate they all were and how dedicated to providing these children with the best chance to grow up and thrive has inspired me a large amount.
