Today is our last day in Birmingham!! As excited as I am to go to London, it’s also bittersweet to be leaving knowing that our trip is coming to an end. We started the day with our last lecture at BCU. We first had the chance to talk about critical care nursing and cardiovascular diseases in the US, UK, and Nigeria, since that was where our lecturer was raised and started here career as a nurse. We started by learning some basic statistics about the prevalence and effects of these diseases on the different populations. One thing that shocked me was how high the rates of heart diseases were in Nigeria since that isn’t something that is talked about. Most of what I have heard about this country was all related to comunicable diseases, such as malaria or ebola. Another thing she said that surprised me was that in order to receive emergency care in Nigeria, you have to pay before you receive any services. This really shocked me because I am so used to the idea that everybody receives treatment if you enter the emergency room despite the financial aspects, because that is figured out later. Another thing was that they do not have ambulances, so emergency care especially for cardiac related issues is delayed by hours, sometimes days due to how difficult it is to get to the hospital and the initial out of pocket cost. This delay in care means that patients are not receiving proper preventative care, or proper care when they are experiencing the emergency. This made me extremely grateful to not have that extra stress when also dealing with a medical emergency. 

Next, we got to learn about ECGs. This is something that a lot of nurses are not very good at reading, but it should be better taught to reduce a delay of care by waiting for a doctor to interpret it in an emergency. Especially since I am considering working in critical care, this is an important skill because your patients are almost always going to be connected to some sort of telemetry.  There are so many different parts to performing and understanding what I thought was a very basic medical assessment. You have to understand exactly where to put the electrodes and what lead they connect to. We learned that even though there are only 10 electrodes, which is the part that sticks to the skin, it produces 12 leads, which is the line reading it produces. This is because the electrodes on the limbs, excluding the right leg, count between each other, and then also to the heart.  For some reason the right leg acts as a neutural electrode, so it doesn’t really count for anything, although I am not sure exactly why. Before leaving BCU, we spent some time saying goodbyes and thank yous to chinenye. She has done so much for us this trip and I am extremely appreciative to have had the opportunity to learn so much from her about not only nursing, but so many things! She really has such a passion for both patient care and teaching and it really comes off in her work. 

We then headed back to grab a quick lunch and get on the bus to head to london!!! It was a 3 hour bus ride, so most of my time was spent napping and finally going through all of my photos from the past week and a half, which took a really long time. Then, we finally arrived in london!! We first headed up to our room to quickly drop off all of our things, and then we went to explore paddington station. I love all of the paddington movies, so it was really cool to see areas of where it was filmed, and also to look around the store as well, where I got some cute things for myself and family. We then just explored some of the street vendor shops around the area, where we got some more little souviners before heading to dinner. It was the alumni dinner, so we got to meet students on anothe trip in london, as well as some professors, one of them being the genetics professor for the fall! Then, to end our night we came back to the hotel to rest up and finish planning some sites we want to visit before our long day exploring the city tomorrow, which I am very excited for!!