Monday, July 20, 2009

Mission Trips Help Nurses Apply Cultural Skills to Practice

One of the first questions Betsy M. Tirado Ortiz, RN, AAS, asks parents of the Dominican babies she treats in the pediatric intensive care unit at Morgan Stanley-Children?s Hospital of NewYork-Presbyterian in New York City is whether they?ve given their infants anything to drink other than breast milk or formula.It?s not an unusual question, says Tirado Ortiz, who has spent years working in the Dominican Republic on medical missions, but the answer often is atypical.?In the Dominican community they will use certain teas if the baby is colicky and that will sometimes cause a lot of problems,? says Tirado Ortiz, who has been on more than 30 medical missions in the past 15 years. ?They use anise teas that treat colic, but the problem is they use the wrong anise ? the one they use at home is not readily available in the United States, and the anise teas here also cause arrhythmias.?Similarly, the time Tirado Ortiz has spent in Guatemala has taught her to ask parents of Guatemalan patients whether they?ve given their children baby aspirin.Mission Trips Help Nurses Apply Cultural Skills to PracticeOriginally from: http://news.nurse.com/article/20090720/NATIONAL01/307200012

View this post on my blog: http://travelnursesuccess.com/mission-trips-help-nurses-apply-cultural-skills-to-practice

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