Haiti Jobs

I got an email from one of the doctors who is part of the medical team a few days ago:

Hi Kim, 

I am a pediatrician and the medical director of our Haiti mission team.

I am so glad you are coming along. My last team only had one nurse and it was really tough. This time we have 4 maybe even 5, so much better.

Margie and Lynn have told me that they would like to work in the pharmacy. Margie said you like hands on jobs best. I would like to find out what you want to do as we are going to try to prepare a little to make things a little smoother. You can trade off later in the week but initally getting set up it's nice to have one person in charge of a station.

I will need a nurse to do the check in. It means taking a lot of weights and blood pressures, and other vitals as you see fit, like temps.  You would have 2 helpers.

The other station is the lab. We are going to have a little machine to check hgb/hcts and lytes/glucose with. Also lots of urine dips and preg tests. This person would also likely oversee the scabies treatments. Again 2 helpers along side.

Let me know what you think. I still need to ask Betty also what she wants to do.
Looking forward to a wonderful experience.

I wrote back with:

Actually, the lab station sounds the most interesting, but honestly I really want to be where ever I am most helpful!  I don't think that I would have any problem with either of these jobs, although I do not know French.

She answered with:

Thanks for getting back to me so quick. I talked with Bettie today and she is very happy to do the BP check in station, so you are set to be the lab RN. She lives up in Shelton so it would be hard to do the training on the i-stat machine anyways. I should be getting the machine in the mail on April 12th, and so sometime after that you and our pathologist, Julie Kingery will need to get together and figure out how to use it. I want to make sure we have all the right supplies and controls and all that. It's good to practice reading Urine dipstixs too before you go. No worries on the language. We will have Creole translators and they are very versed on telling people to pee in cups!! :) You can read about the i-stat on line at Abbot.com.