Independence Day Weekend

What's more American than fishing, country music, and grilling? Well...does it still count if we do it in Ecuador? Either way, we had a great Independence Day weekend enjoying the country, and checking out the Cajas mountains (absolutely PHENOMENAL btw).

But when you throw four medical students together for a couple hours, of course the topic will come back to around to ...school, trauma leagues, etc. This entire trip, we've been trying to keep our objectives in mind (thanks, Jeremy!). We realize how important it is to understand the implications of our project, how it fits into the big picture, and whether or not it will have real life implications. We don't want to do research for the sake of research. We want the results to fill a necessary need in the system. There's a lot of waiting time in the ER in between all of the ambulances. We're trying to best utilize that time and have been learning medical Spanish, shadowing in the ER, and just observing the ER process in general (from patient arrival to patient treatment). Every time you start a research project and get deeper into it, more and more questions arise.

It was interesting to see how people got to the emergency room. We spent hours on hours waiting for emergent ambulances, only to get roughly one ambulance for every three hours. Most ambulances that arrived came with patient transfers from other facilities. Instead, it seemed like most people arrived at the ER via their own vehicles or taxis, even if it was trauma related. I asked Sandro about this, and it seems like an issue with the EMS system is related to their response time. When people call 911 for an ambulance, they have no idea if it'll take 10 minutes or 30 minutes for an ambulance to arrive, whereas if you flag down a taxi, you get immediate transportation. Even the idea of calling 911 is a relatively new concept. ECU 911 was established four years ago. Before that, patients had to call individual organizations to get help, all of which had individual dispatch systems - making the process disconcerted and unorganized. There was a separate number for firefighters vs ambulances vs police. With ECU 911, it unified the system. There are billboards all across town publicizing the system and making it well known. In just the last four years, there have already been huge advances forward, so it'll be interesting to see how much more public opinion changes towards the system in upcoming years! As for the response times, we're still not sure why it takes a while, we had a lot of brainstorming: where are ambulances stationed throughout the city? Is traffic slowing down the ambulances, as in do drivers not move for sirens? Are addresses difficult to find? what is the actual response time - are they actually long or is that just public perception? We're not sure, but we'll try and find out as we learn more and more about the system!