“Hello. My name’s Nguyen Thi Thu Thuy. I was born in Hanoi. I’ve been working as a nurse at the ICU of the National Hospital of Pediatrics (NHP) for 20 years. It’s been such a long time. Despite the heavy workload, I really love and stick with my job.”

Learn more from the nurses in Vietnam:

During our trip to Vietnam this past January, we sat down with the Pediatric ICU (PICU) nurses and physicians at the National Hospital of Pediatrics (renamed the Vietnam National Children’s Hospital in April) to learn more about them and their experience with Global Healing. Many of the nurses and physicians we spoke with have worked at the hospital for over ten years and are enthusiastic about learning practical skills that will enable them to provide better care for their patients, including how to make ward rounds, changing the position of an infant to prevent bed sores and ulcers, and identifying critically-ill patients.

One of the ultimate goals of the program is to expand the trainings conducted at the national hospital to the satellite provincial hospitals in order to improve care for the more than two million children living in the northern region of Vietnam. Since our program began in 2014, 75 physicians and nurses at the hospital have received training from Global Healing volunteers. The impact of our program is set to double as trainees prepare to teach what they have learned to their counterparts at the VNCH and beyond. In January, we were able to visit a provincial hospital in Lao Cai, as well as a district hospital in Sa Pa, both in northwest Vietnam near the border with China. We learned from the Lao Cai hospital director that asthma protocols developed at the VNCH during previous training trips are now being implemented at her hospital, demonstrating that the program is already successfully expanding to the provinces.

Training sessions at the VNCH in January were led by Whitney Elton, RN of Connecticut Children’s Medical Center and Evelyn Porter, MD of the University of California, San Francisco, respectively. Our next trip to Vietnam will provide training for Pediatric and Neonatal ICU nurses.

Our training program in Vietnam is made possible through a generous grant from Ronald McDonald House Charities (RMHC).
www.rmhc.org