Hope everyone has been well! Today was our 2nd to last instructional day in Buenos Aires and it was very interesting. We visited a hospital called Hospital Paroissien which is about an hour outside the city. It was a public hospital and it was in a very poor area. The hospital was in pretty bad shape with poor equipment and not enough nurses for all of the patients. It really made me reflect on my situation in the states and feel grateful for all that we have. 

After this we visited the National University of La Matanza. Some of the nursing students do clinicals in the public hospitals that we visited. The school is public, meaning that it is completely free and has about 60,000 students. This is much bigger than Pitt but another difference is that all students are commuters, whereas at Pitt only about 5% of students are commuters. The school also was one of only a few schools to have sports teams in the country. Rather than individual collegiate teams playing against each other, they collegiate association hosts and Olympics for all of the sports combined, very different from Pitt. La Matanza has won every single Olympics. They even have some of their collegiate teams play in professional Argentinian leagues. We got to see nursing students practice clinicals on dummies and saw a blood transfusion. In the US the professor is out of the room for these simulations, however in Argentina the professor was there to guide the students. The students must study for 5 years but then can have any type of muse desired after that. Once we viewed the simulations we went to a lecture hall. The university buildings and amenities seemed a lot more run down than Pitt, and the buildings/campus were massive. We learned about the nursing program in particular that has 1,030 students currently. There are many different specialties that nurses can go into as well as master’s and PhD programs. One thing that I found interesting was that many nursing majors drop out before their bachelors degree, not because the classes are too hard, but because there is an English language requirement that is tough for some students. After this we got to explore some street art in the neighborhood of Palermo. It was so amazing!