Today has been fantastic! We spent the day at the University of Austral which is about 1.5 hours outside of Buenos Aires. Austral is very cool in the sense that it has a hospital as well as a school, similar to Pitt and UPMC. For the first lecture of the day we got to speak to the Founder of the Hospital, Marcelo Pellizzari. He described his reasoning to open the hospital as well as some general practices that were followed. For example, he wanted to give the people better quality care in a more timely manner, since public hospital lines are incredibly long. His main philosophy was to follow 5 items – person center, patient center, leaders in innovation and technology, quality management, and economic and environmental sustainability. These all contribute to his belief that people are the most important asset of any system. While this hospital is on a college campus, it is still private meaning that they only cater to the 15% of the population that uses private healthcare. A similarity from Swiss Medical and Austral was that they were both private however there were still large differences. Austral was much more crowded and had many more rooms with less space, whereas Swiss Medical had many less rooms with more space. We also met the director of operations, Mariano Peliroso. He described many challenges faced by the Hospital including financial sustainability, managing increased demand for services, and healthcare staff shortages. These challenges were quite similar to those that Swiss Medical faced as well. After these lectures we got a tour of the hospital. I really liked how they had a bell on the cancer treatment floor for patients to ring when they were discharged. The hospital was quite large with many specialities, however there were many more people in Australia than in Swiss medical, even though Swiss Medical was physically bigger. Moving on we got to eat lunch with the nursing students at Austral. I met a guy named Carlos who was fantastic. He loved to travel the world and has been to many different fascinating places. He is in his second year of nursing school and said that some of the differences between the US and Argentina was that in Argentina, the nurses are required to do 1 more year of schooling. Carlos said he loved the convenience of having the hospital on campus since it allowed for his clinicals and studies to be in the same place. The geography was also beautiful as we were outside of the city. Today was a lovely day.