It’s not often that you see the words “ventilator” and “speed dating” in the same sentence, but that is probably the best way to describe an interdisciplinary activity that occurred at the Health Education Center (HEC) last week.

Three sophomore Respiratory Therapy (RT) students worked with the over 82 level-4 nursing students to help them become more comfortable with the Servo I, Puritan Bennett 840, and Drager Evita XL mechanical ventilators.

Each group of nursing students had 20 minutes of “hands-on” time with each ventilator with the second-year RT student serving as their coach. This gave the nursing students the rare opportunity to try different things with the ventilators without putting patients at risk, and have an RT student there to answer any questions. The “speed dating format” helped make sure that all the students had a chance to work with all three vents.

The nursing and RT programs have a long history of working together on interdisciplinary projects. In 2015 alone the two programs worked together on mock codes, simple spirometry, and other cross training opportunities.

A few weeks ago I had the privilege of traveling to Cape Town, South Africa, on behalf of St. Petersburg College (SPC).  The purpose of the trip was to see if Cape Town would make a good site for a study abroad opportunity for SPC students, and to visit two clinics there to determine if they would could provide a good service learning opportunity for our students in the Health Services Administration (HSA) program, and possibly other health programs.  I was also fortunate enough to be able to travel with Dr. Donna Ettel, who is a faculty member in the HSA program.

I was very impressed with Cape Town.  The people were very friendly, and as I hope a few of my pictures show, the country is beautiful.  It’s unfortunate that my weak skills in photography don’t do the area justice.  It is also one of the most linguistically diverse areas in the world, with over 11 languages and dialects spoken in Cape Town alone.  They also have one of the widest varieties of plant life in the world.

But nice people and beautiful scenery aside, perhaps the most impressive thing I saw while in South Africa were the clinics I visited.  Cape Town, like many large cities, is a study in contrast.  While it is a modern, affluent  and beautiful city, it also suffers from areas of intense poverty unlike any I have seen.  I was very impressed with the work that the two clinics we visited do to help to alleviate the impact of such poverty.

The first clinic was SHAWCO.  SHAWCO is comprised of student volunteers who are medical students from around the world.  They offer free medical clinics to people of all ages in the heart of the poorest areas.  The work they do is incredible.

The second site we visited was PEEBLES.  PEEBLES is a diverse agency that offers thousands of migrant workers, including hundreds of children, an incredible array of services, from a medical and dental clinic, to child care, to social services and skills training, to nutritional support.  The scope of services they offer is too long to list here, but the impact they have is immeasurable.

I can’t wait for our students to have an opportunity to see this beautiful area, meet the wonderful people of Cape Town, and see the incredible work done by these two organizations.

Over 5.8 trillion cigarettes were smoked in 2014.  Smoking lead to over 6.3 million deaths in 2013, and it is estimated over 1 billion people will die from smoking related illnesses in this century.

International Cigarette Smokers Increase Averages

The World Lung Foundation published a recent article that indicates that despite declines in smoking rates in many countries, increases in smoking in China have offset those declines.  Interestingly, in China almost 2,250 cigarettes were smoked for each person over 15.

Cigarette sales remain profitable – tobacco industry profits were 44 billion dollars in 2013, and it is estimated that the tobacco industry makes $7000.00 per tobacco death.

For more information, check out this article.