After more than 24 hours of travel we finally arrived in Bilbao late last night! We started our day early this morning and first headed to the Basurto Hospital via the metro.. In the hospital we heard from multiple people in the hospital about the healthcare in Spain, specifically the Basque Country. I learned more about how the Spanish healthcare system and how different it is compared to the US. The main difference being universal healthcare for all citizen and how that impacts the care patients get in the Basque Country. In this same presentation I also learned about the types of nurses, the requirements, as well as the implementations of good nursing practices in Spain. Another fun fact that I learned from one of the nurses at the hospital that I was talking to is that there are tunnels that connect all 20 pavilions of the hospital!
Our next visit was to Biobizkaia, a research laboratory that is located in Cruces University Hospital. In this stop I was able to see the 3D printing/bioprinting platform. I was able to hear from one of the researchers working in this specific lab about how the printing works and how it is useful. One aspect of this research that was interesting to me was how they work with surgeons to prepare them for their surgeries. One of the examples shown today is how CT scan or MRI image of the patients jaw is then 3D printed in the lab. These 3D printed jaws are unique to each patient and is helpful as it allows the surgeon to essentially practice the surgery on the exact jaw they will be working on, thus ensuring the surgeons do the surgery to the best of their ability. I found this part extremely interesting, specifically because I would want to work in a lab similar to this in the future. The part of biomedical engineering that I like the best is seeing how it actually helps patients and working with surgeons to be at the cutting-edge of medical technologies. So seeing these printings up close and understanding the behind of the scenes of this technique was fascinating and I learned a lot.
After seeing the lab we then learned about implementation research from different researches in the same facility. Implementation research is researching about how to implement new medical techniques and practices into real-life. I found this talk very interesting as it addressed something I never thought of and explored a different type of research than the printing lab. It takes 15-17 years of work to actually see new medical techniques being fully practiced and integrated into the healthcare system, so implementation research is understanding the best way to make these techniques a new reality for physicians. One example I learned about today was seeing how a regulated schedule of physical exercise for cancer patients receiving chemotherapy improves the patients quality of life. This type of research was also fascinating because it is data and statistics driven and provides real information on how well medical discoveries actually benefit the population and increase the quality of life for patients.
Overall, today was extremely interesting and relevant to my aspirations and interests. From learning about how primary care and the national healthcare system works to seeing researches explain their different research. I really solidified that biomedical engineering is the major for me and had such a fun time just learning so much! I can’t wait to learn more on the rest of the trip 🙂