The professionalizing experience of 17 students fromUniversità Campus Bio-Medico di Roma
December 1, 2017 - Two weeks in Madagascar for a team of 17 people fromUniversità Campus Bio-Medico di Roma. Some doctors - 2 paediatricians, an ophthalmologist and an anesthetist - lived the experience of international university cooperation together with 9 students of the third and fifth year of the Degree Course in Medicine and another 3 of the Degree Course in Nursing.
Guests of the Saint Damien Medical and Surgical Center in the city of Ambanja, in the north-west of Madagascar, the students had the opportunity to increase their skills in tropical medicine and at the same time, to be able to transfer advanced diagnostic and therapeutic skills thanks to the presence of specialists UCBM. On the other hand, they found themselves practicing in an area characterized by a lack of infrastructure, especially in the health sector. In fact, the clinic serves 500 people with two operating theatres, an analysis laboratory, a radiology service, a dentistry service and an ophthalmology service.
In particular, part of the group conducted a screen with paediatriciansing nutrition in schools which made it possible to identify cases of malnutrition and anemia present in the school population. The children in whom nutritional deficiencies were found were then treated with vitamins, micronutrients and iron that the students brought from Italy. The initiative had an immediate local impact, to the point that, at the request of the local authorities, the screening it was also replicated in the Bemaneviky mission, in the interior of the country, where conditions of poverty and nutritional deficiencies are even more significant.
Still within the school population, the ophthalmology team was able to carry out a screening of visual deficits. But still for the anesthetist and future nurses the workcamp was an opportunity for coaching and traininging on the anesthetic job in the operating room as well as to transfer bedside care concepts and practices to local staff. “In general,” Dr. said. Gigi Mottini, coordinator of the workcamp, "the experience in Madagascar represented a step forward in solidarity education which enters directly into the professional profile of our future doctors and nurses".