Tuesday, September 30, 2008
China
For my international placement I was in China working in a children's rehabilitation centre. Working at the centre was a lot more different than I expected. Obviously i thought treatments would be quite different, but i didn't realise that the way the staff actually treated the children would be so different to what I am used to. On the first day at the centre I was quite shocked out how the centre was run, where children take part in therapy all day every day. Each day they do the same things in a therapy based way rather than incorporating it into play to make it more practical and interesting for the child. Many of the newer staff were also really physical to the children. Yelling, pulling and pushing was seen every day. I felt like I just wanted to change everything they were doing because it wasn't the way I have learnt. After being at the centre for a few days, I became more patient and learnt ways to show the staff alternative treatment methods without actually telling them. They were really observant in our treatment methods and really picked them up well. One thing we were suprised about was that they were also picking up our passive and calm way of treating the children and how we made therapy fun as well. This experience really made me see that you shouldn't always judge people at first glance. It also helped me develop different ways of showing people different methods of treatment and you shouldn't judge peoples ability to observe what you are doing.
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2 comments:
Coming from a third world country, I have seen first hand how different the facilities and resources are compared to Australia. We should all be grateful to have such amazing facilities. In my experience, people from my country do not have the opportunities for professional development and the learning of new and recent skills, so they do the same thing every day. If they are given the chance however, they absorb new knowledge happily and appreciate it. It is also frustrating working in conditions where everything is broken, and the morale of staff and job satisfaction is oftne low. What an amazing opportunity to go and provide your recent skills to people like that. I think it is something we should all do one day.
It sounds like a good lesson to learn and one I look forward to on my Malaysia placement. As tracylee said we don't realise how lucky we are not just with our health system but with our education of health staff. We have open resources in our teaching staff, their experiences and different ways of doing the same things which can be useful when a patient is uncooperative one way. The biggest thing I look forward to is the challenge of this different way of doing things and finding strategies to deal with the situations and opportunities that arise.
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